Sunday, July 6, 2014

Creative Tool Use

Those of you who know me well know that I often revel in the (benign) mis-use of tools.
Friday's problem was that we wanted to cut a part out of machinist's wax, but the part was only about 25mm thick, and the thinnest wax slab we had on hand was just over 2". Also, we don't have any tooling more than an inch (25mm) long, so cutting the part out using the mill or shopbot wasn't going to happen. Normally, one would use a bandsaw or something similar to correct this opportunity, but we don't have one in the garage. We thought about surfacing the block down to an inch thick, but that would involve wasting a huge amount of material.
Inspiration struck - we have a hacksaw! But no blades. Sigh. But we do have a hand saw for wood... So I mounted the wax block in the CNC Mill vise (carefully) and cut it in half, as carefully as I could. It wasn't straight, of course, which lead to an impromptu use of the fly cutter to surface the block.
I don't have pictures of the surfacing or the finished part, as we finished cutting just before it was time to leave for the day. But I do have a couple of me using a hand saw and a $10 000 bench vise :-)

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