I need to precisely locate and cut holes in a Lexan film of 10mils (0.25mm) thickness. Is there a recommended way to do this? I wanted to use the laser cutter, but was advised that this material is not approved.
Relatedly, but different, I have about 100 sheets of this same material which are already cut but missing a few holes. My plan was to use a fixture and drill to make the needed holes. Can anyone suggest a better way?
Thanks!!!
How precise is “precise”? Could you cut a template (with the holes) in plywood, trap the lexan between two plywood layers, and drill or punch the holes using the template as a guide? You could make 3D-printed fixtures 0.25mm thick, precisely attach these to the plywood, and use them to register the material to the template.
Or just make one out of aluminum on the Manual Mill and use the end hole drill size for the fixture. Probably want to true up two edges or add two pins so you can locate between parts accurately
OK. Precise is relative. I have a metal part which is manufactured at a precision metal shop. What I need to do is apply a protective film down on the inside of the part, making holes for the studs which are located at various locations.
What I’ve done so far is cut a template on the laser cutter and then cut and drill the material based on the template. This actually work OK for the first 6, but I noticed a pretty serious problem with the process.
There is some scaling / error introduced somewhere because the actual part cut by the thunder is not exactly correct. The original part drawing is in ACAD (dwg). I convert this to DXF using a discontinued Autodesk program called Autosketch. Then I import the DXF into Adobe Illustrator and save it as a .ai. Lastly, I import it into RDWorks and cut with the laser. This results in a very slight error which accumulates from the center of the part as X and Y increases. My part is roughly 48" x 20". The accumulated error is aprox .125" in the X direction and .050" in the Y direction at each end. The center of the part seems to be perfect.
Currently, I can verify that my tools seem to verify that the conversion from DWG to DXF doesn’t seem to introduce any error. I’ll have to get back to DMS and check further down the chain.
Anyhow, I am very interested in other options. The direction of cutting a template (maybe CNC?) and then creating a plywood fixture with right angle alignment corners seems to be a good one!
I’ve had sone experience dealing with trying to cut exactly Identical hole in many sheets of lexan before but nothing quite that thin. Do they all still have the protective film? I have had the most succes building a jig that was deep enough and exact enough for me to place in several sheets in and when under pressure holds every sheet with relatively equal pressure during the drilling process. When I built the jigs I made sure that no areas bulged or caused deformity from too much pressure or angular pressure on any other axis. I would prep my drill points by placing blue or masking tape opposite the film on every single sheet I planned to drill at every place I wanted the holes. Then I used a press on higher speeds to make the holes using slow even pressure in one clean motion to prevent bounce between layers. The tape helped this greatly and I would rarely if ever get a bad drill overheat or cause it to crack. The key seemed to be minimizing air gaos between layers at the actual drill site and even unforced movement to completion with the press