Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill_B
I admit the connectors look good for quick assembly, perhaps rivaling 80/20 in quickness, if you have a bunch of pre-cut "standard" length tubes. building a frame would be quick and you could set your tube pieces up to give useful outside dimensions for the assemblies.
No dimensions given for the connectors - but I infer from the tubing they're selling that there might be a problem with 1/16 1" tube. They list wall thickness for their tube as .065", so the connectors must fit inside there, snugly? Their other option has walls .060 and listed as "slip fit" for things you want to disassemble easily. This makes one wonder how the connectors will fare in the .0625" walls we're thinking about here. Loose-ish but not slippery? I guess I'd have to buy a few for a sample frame to get some hands-on trials.
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Precut standard length tubes? I should introduce you to my new best friend, the
Diablo Non-Ferrous Circular Saw Blade. Toss this into your favorite 10" miter/chopsaw and you'll be amazed how fast you can put out tube for frames. I CADed the frame for our shooter, wrote out a cut list, and we had all the tube parts cut and ready to go in less than an hour. With accurate bevels and clean square edges. I can't tell you how happy I am the I noticed it on a Lowe's trip a few years ago. It makes it easier to work with just about any long aluminum on the bot. In fact, I think it's so nifty, I'm doing this:
Teams, if you do any significant manual work with long aluminum tube, channel, the kitframe, pretty much anything aluminum, then you need to buy this
Diablo Non-Ferrous Circular Saw Blade and a half-decent chop saw like this
Hitachi 10" Compound Miter Saw. You will be amazed how much faster and better things go vs. your current vertical/horizontal bandsaw, hacksaw, or dull butter knife. You'll wonder how you ever managed without it.
Ahem. And now that that's out of my system... Yes, I'm a little concerned about the fit of those connectors in various aluminum square tubing. I think I'll be lucky enough to have it work for me, and my terribly cheap square tubing from
SSS-Steel just so happens to be nominally 0.065" wall. So I should be fine, but others mileage may vary.
Also, 8020 actually has a similar line of tubing and connectors marketed as their
Quick Frame series. No clue if it's better or worse, but it looks like it mates up pretty easy with the standard 8020 profiles for teams that want to mix and match.