Hey Everyone! We're getting started on builds using these wonderful building blocks for managing electronics in outdoor enclosures. It's a great way to make lego style building blocks for almost endless applications. I'll post more details for the community to share ideas in the future. For now I've looked around regarding tapping and see a number of posts but not something specific to my question. Any suggestions as to how to handle tapping a large number of rails? We've got a job starting now that will mean we have to tap about 200 rails, which is going to take some time! We'll be using drill taps, and have some standard cutting oil here but I'd love any insight as to ways of making things go smoother, cutting oil recommendations and etc. Thanks! Chris Anderson
I wonder if you could attach a Drill tap, to a Stepper Motor, and program it to Tap holes? It should be simple to program clockwise and anti-clockwise movements. To calculate how many turns would be desired, and Stepper motors would certainly have the torque for such a project. For that many rails it would seem to be worthy of investigation. Perhaps viable for marketing later? Gray
Hi Chris, Glad to hear the project is underway and we are excited to see it. On tapping, the dream would always be one of these Tapmatics but they are far too pricy. @GrayUK if we can dream it we can build it! In my opinion your best bet would be to set up a simple jig to hold the extrusion and to keep the drill aligned then using some M5 drill taps with your drill chuck set to about 8 and some tapping oil go to town. There may be simple solutions out there but not sure. There is always the option of using self tapping screws as well
How about, 1 x Stepper, driving 2 x Drill taps, at a set width, to be able to tap two holes at a time? (Dreaming, Dreaming, Dreaming.) I'm good at Dreaming, it's the next bit I'm not too good at! Gray
Thanks for the replies! We'll let you guys know how this ends up going for us. I'm going to bring in some Tap Magic fluid and mill down a simple little guide jig to slap on the railing and see how it goes. We'll let you know. Also we ended up building a pretty sweet adjustable Z axis table, with vac board attachment that I think everyone will be interested in. I'll post details on that when we get through this project. Thanks! Chris
Update: we did 200 rails in about one hour with the drill taps from the openbuilds store, aluminium cutting fluid and simple block and vice. It worked great! That was way better than the standard m5 taps & lubricant from the box stores.
