Products > Test Equipment
Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread
Vince:
--- Quote from: tautech on July 04, 2022, 10:43:36 am ---
--- Quote from: Vince on July 04, 2022, 10:07:29 am ---
--- Quote from: Robert763 on July 04, 2022, 07:44:05 am ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on July 03, 2022, 10:49:14 pm ---
--- Quote from: Vince on July 03, 2022, 04:46:45 pm ---Now I think or it, one big advantage of punches is that you can make any shape you want, not just round holes... so it opens up an entire new world of possibilities 8)
You could make a hole with a flat, to fit pots and keep them from spinning round and round, or anything... as long as someone somewhere sells the shape that you want...
--- End quote ---
They used to be quite common - you could get punches for the classic potentiometer with flat, D connectors, IEC inlets, and so on. Last time I bought some sheet metal punches the ones for anything other than purely round and rectangular holes seemed to have disappeared off the lists of the moderately priced manufacturers and I didn't look at the extortionately priced ones.
--- End quote ---
Made obsolete in industry by laser cutting and CNC routing.
I've bought a 2mm laser cut panel with D shaped holes for less than a blank panel by the equipment case OEM
--- End quote ---
Ah yeah, laser cutting... but I hope prices have come down at least, at least an order of magnitude for x1 quantities / prototype since I last looked 15 years ago, where some German company wanted 100 Euros for a small piece of sheet aluminium with a square cut in it for an LCD, and a couple holes for knobs, forthe project I was working on... and they dared bragging about how "affordable" they were, at that ! :wtf:
--- End quote ---
For the life of me I couldn't imagine chassis punches were obsolete so fished out an old Farnell catalogue and there they were under Hole Punches ! :horse:
Take your pick:
https://nz.element14.com/c/tools-production-supplies/tools-hand-workholding/punch-tools/prl/results/2?st=hole%20punch
https://nz.rs-online.com/web/c/hand-tools/measuring-marking/punch-die-kits/?pn=1&searchTerm=Hole+punch
Nobody said they were cheap. ::)
--- End quote ---
OK.... maybe if laser cutting has become super cheap, then it's more interesting than buying punches, at least not for infrequent prototype stuff.
I guess punches still makes sense for people who say build tube amps for a living, and have to make lots of hole in the chassis, and only have a very few different sizes.
For them punching makes sense financially I guess, as well as the convenience of being able to make them on the spot, no delays, no shipping, no need to make and supply a CAD drawing, just grab your chassis and punch a hole where you feel like it, right here right now.
tautech:
However if you were into assembly, mains cable strain relief fittings, Pot indexing holes, IEC cable fittings are the common ones that would be worth owning along with a step drill.
Gunna go looking on Alibaba as to what they have there...... :popcorn:
bd139:
I can make any hole with a step drill and a beer :-DD
Disclaimer: may not be straight or in the right place.
THDplusN_bad:
--- Quote from: bd139 on July 02, 2022, 08:24:18 pm ---[..]
Well my options were:
1. Trying to drive wonky GP-IB cables and devices from Visual Basic through a hooky ISA card that only worked with 16-bit windows so I had to write drivers for NT for it in a room with no natural light other than 30 minutes at lunch time as it was dark in the morning and dark in the evening. The only break being writing CoCreate workmanager's mutant version of BASIC that sort of half ran on Solaris and half on Windows. Or munging bits of Perl on a manky Ultra 2 desperately trying to replace an S390 batch job before they had to pay IBM another vat of kidneys.
2. Get paid 3x that for a trendy job at a web app startup which involved doing 2 hours of work a day in a swanky well lit windowed office in the city and spend the rest of the time pissing around, getting drunk after work and getting into the more interesting kinds of trouble ;)
I chose well 8)
--- End quote ---
Sorry, laughed :-) Seems you have indeed chosen well...
tautech:
--- Quote from: bd139 on July 04, 2022, 11:08:03 am ---I can make any hole with a step drill and a beer :-DD
Disclaimer: may not be straight or in the right place.
--- End quote ---
Probably not as cheap as using one of these:
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/group/Tools/1017341_507613415.html?spm=a2g0o.store_pc_home.pcShopHead_697437.1_4_8
Whether they'd be any good for anything other than plastic is another thing ? :-//
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