Gunner wrote:
Buddy came by today with a piece of 1/4" diamond plate aluminum he is
making a dashboard for his boat out of. He had come by a couple weeks
ago, and roughed it out on my WT bandsaw, and now needed to cut the
holes for the gauges, Tach etc. They were all bigger than normal
sizes..so had no hole saws big enough. I tried a decent wood type
circle cutter, which broke, made one up by tigging a piece of 3/8 x
1/2" tool steel to a 1/2" shank, and put it into my heavy boring head,
and grinding a tripanning profile on the tool steel. Which ran 1 hole
then broke the tool steel in half. Blink blink....

I finally finished all the gauge holes by hole sawing them, then using
a tapered face mill to plunge to the right diameter, and the Big tach
hole was done by hole sawing, then roughing to diameter with using
x/y handwheels and a big 2 flute end mill, finishing with a die
grinder and a carbide burr. T

there has to be a better way.

I recently had to cut out a pickguard for a heavy metal bass guitar from
aluminum diamondplate. I did the internal cutting using a jigsaw mounted on my
1949 Shopsmith. Worked fine, but a tad tedious. I *never* seem to have the right
size hole saw! Anyway pickup holes are rectangular with rounded corners so even
if I had every hole saw made it wouldn't have helped me.

GWE