RT blanking

have checked it and very helpful- thanks

i think the Jane Redmond rotating bench pin will suffice and it is much cheaper by multiples than the KnewConcept angle saw cutting station. I will not be hardening my dies to save a step. As a hobbiest ; I am not going to cut too many dies (only intricate and essential ones). I will be bowing to the advice Jayne Redmond left me. Pancake dies are a means to an end. just another tool in the War Chest. make what you need and in my case mostly for interest sake for the challenge. thanks FY info and suggestion

Hi All,

Slightly off topic, but here goes

I am building a lapidary workshop, actually this will be iteration #6
of the workshop over many years. Sometimes guys my age get a
sportscar, and put it in a nice shiny new garage, which is what i am
going to do except skipping the sports car part, as I need somewhere
to put my 18" and 24" rock saws.

Part of a shiny new garage involves a concrete floor, and epoxy
sealing. Presumably the epoxy floor will help with any oil leaks from
the saws, but I am curious if anyone has experience with them,
specifically, are epoxy floors very slippery when wet?

Mark Zirinsky
Studio-Z
www.studio-Z.org
mark@studio-z.org

Hereā€™s a quote from an internet page on epoxy flooring:
<<Epoxy flooring isnā€™t as slippery as it looks and itā€™s easy to add a skid-resistant additive to the topcoat to make the floor very safe, even when wet. Without a nonslip additive, epoxy flooring can become very slippery when wet, especially with oil spills.>>
HTH, royjohn

Mark,

It dependsā€¦

What I suggest is go talk to the service manager or mechanics at a large garage or a car dealership find out what make of Epoxy or polyurethane that they used on the flooring and if itā€™s slippery when oily, and they can probably also recommend to you a good installer if you need one

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Border closed at Peace Archā€¦dr.boony looks for it to last throughout Summer. If I pass thru USA customs they might not allow me through and when I return I would be placed into mandatory 14 days quarantine methinks. This is supposition thus far. I will patiently wait for more positive news with better predictability to clear into/out of the border

Ready to order my rotating blanking bench pin System from Jayne Redmanā€¦but the customs in Canada/ USA might make this quite challenging and unknowableā€¦canā€™t wait to start creating a few pancake diesā€¦it appears this will take longer than I thought.

Blanking tools and epoxy floors are slightly off topicā€¦new?

Thanks for the informationā€¦helped open dialogue with Shelton & Redman.

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I agree , design your multiple component piece and send to Dar Shelton. Based on his experience you get it right. Be it that I am a hobbiest. I am pursuing this blanking venture for interest sake at the moment . Where it leads to is intrigue ingenuity

Tooling from Jayne Redman in Blaine. When border opens Iā€™ll be there to start flipping pancake dies. Dar Shelton is sending me one of his pancake dies. When I see the actual pancake dieI can use it as a model to achieve. Thanks-Dar Shelton.

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the border between Canada and the USA is still closedā€¦my tooling held in Blaine WA from Jayne Redman and Dars Sheltonā€¦egads. canā€™t wait to start sawing out blanking plates.

the difference between Kevins dies and Darsā€™ dies are simple. kevins are cut with a vertical opening and work best with thicker metal. Darsā€™ dies have an angled opening and cut like scissors and work well for most all metal thicknesses. Most of my dies from Dar are used on 24 to 28 gauge metal. With the price of precious metal, darsā€™ dies deserve a closer look. Iā€™ve noticed that kevins dies often create an edge that requires filing.

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The difference is huge, i.m.o. , but Iā€™m not going to write a detailed post about everything Iā€™ve already written and explained a thousand tomes. Basically, it can be thought of as equivalent to either industrial tools or hobby tools. Kevin and Sandra Sirles have the dies laser cut, with no tilt to the plate while cutting. This leaves a tolerance gap, similar to a tightly-screwed-together pair of scissors vs. a pair with a sloppy joint. The loose dies work fine on some metals, but can leave bad burrs or even have metal simply stick in the die instead of cutting. The cold rolled steel is not hardened, so pointy bits get smashed easily, and the limits of detail are restrictive, design-wise. These problems can all be addressed with correct sawing angles , and heat treating tool steel. These are things I did out of necessity because the other half of my job besides making dies is to punch out parts for people, so I have to have tools that perform well and cut parts that the cheaper dies might not (or simply canā€™t). Those dies fill a need for people, and the ones made like The Creator (RT :rofl: ) intended fill other, more serious needs.

Roget Taylor presented the original RT paper https://silversmithblogdotcom.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/project-report-no-12e_1-the-r-t-blanking-system-may-1980.pdf in 1980, with specific parameters for sawing dies at an angle to leave a tight tolerance, so that dies cut thin metal cleanly. I started with that paper and the RT kit from Rio Grande in 1985, and have been perfecting the process ever since. Anyone should feel free to email me sheltech@yahoo.com because I have been out of the Orchid habit since going back to FaceBarf in 2018 :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hey, Ma, did you get the die ?

No Dar,
the die and Jayne Redmanā€™s tooling is still at the border in Blaine, Washington Stateā€¦ supposedly might re-open in October 21-2020ā€¦I believe this will be postponed again.

mike

This is one of the Great Myths about pancake dies: that metal needs to be hard for them- that you canā€™t use soft metal. Itā€™s bunk , plain and simple, as some kind of broad statement about ALL pancake dies. I know exactly where it comes from, and why it has been perpetuated so widely for so long. No knock on any of that , because as much as (more than) anyone, I understand the difficulties of getting good (best possible) results from these dies. Itā€™s simply people trying to do something hard and not completely succeeding, or using tools that arenā€™t as ā€œcorrectlyā€ made as others. It comes from people not quite getting the importance of making dies with tight tolerance, and from the widespread use of dies cut at no angle with lasers, that do not have tight tolerances.

Half of the entire concept of RT Dies as presented by Roger Taylor is about setting the right angle to create a tight fit between the male & female parts of the die. When working with certain metals - thin metals, and soft tempers -  this isn't something you can fudge on , and getting it right for these situations puts us right at the edge of what's possible. A die that isn't extra tight will work  in some situations (thicker metal, harder metal) that it might not otherwise work in (thinner and/or softer metal) , but a die with a very tight fit could work perfectly fine on the thinner and softer metal.

Again, making dies that are tight enough to cut cleanly on soft, thin metal is sort of akin to an extreme sport in that it's operating out past the normal boundaries of what almost everyone else does. It requires setting angles that make the dies difficult to open at first, and if one isn't precise in this, it's easy to go past the right angle and have the die destroy itself. 

The edge is the edge , basically, and if the angle is too much, the cutting edges collide and chew each other up. Thatā€™s over the edge, but there is a perfect spot ON the edge, where (with a hardened die) you can crack a freshly cooked die open (and if itā€™s an intricate design, youā€™re relieved that a little weak part didnā€™t break !) and when you close it the first time, the cutting edges DO in fact collide, and a tiny sliver of steel is sheared off . In this way the die seats itself, and the fit is perfect and very tight, and it will cut very thin, very soft metal, if called upon. The progenitor technology to these exact RT dies was something called ā€˜The Continental Processā€™ and involved using huge pieces of steel (weā€™re talking inch-thick by many feet in size) that was way more extreme in using this self-shearing of the cutting edges to create a good fit . Thatā€™s rather beside my point, but illustrates that such a situation isnā€™t without precedent.

Now, it should also be made clear that not every pancake/RT die NEEDS to be made this tight; The extreme tightness is generally only for those situations where thin/soft metal is being used. I mean things like 30 ga dead soft copper or brass. However, backing down by just 1/2 or one degree from the extreme is still probably pretty far past what most other people use, and is enough to create dies that are still very tight and will work very well on medium range metals, like 26 ga (.016" ) 1/8 hard copper or 22 ga. (.027" soft silver) . The range of usefulness is dictated by the thickness of the die , for maximum capacity, and itā€™s tightness , for itā€™s minimum capacity.

DogBoy (^8

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