About a year ago I toured a facility that does precision laser cutting. Mostly they work on flat stock but they also have a machine that does tubes. The owner told me that they do a lot of work fish mouthing titanium tubes for a bicycle company in Massachusetts...
Jamie Swan - Northport, N.Y.
henox wrote:
> Subject: RE: [CR] was: Re: Bilaminated Frame Construction, now:
> shapingmachine
>
> I don't think it likely that a shaper would have been used to produce
> sheetmetal "lug" blanks.
>
> A tracing nibbler, however, would have been just the ticket.
>
> Using a nibbler to make "lug" blanks, you would first make a pattern guide
> which is attached to a sheetmetal blank. The pattern is smaller than the
> finished part and is moved against a guide pin while the blank is nibbled
> away to produce an identical (but larger) version of the pattern.
> One of the manufacturers where I once worked had a Heck nibbler which was
> used to quickly produce sheet metal brackets and other small parts.
>
> BTW, in one of my visits to the Dawes factory I was shown how they used a
> cylindrical nibbler to miter the ends of the tubes, to basically nibble the
> fishmouths which they then touched up with a file. Very fast!
>
> Hugh Enox
> La Honda