WE dont have a mill or extensive tools. What is a good method to cheesehole into 1/8" thick aluminum box beams?
Hole saw and a hand drill is the easy way to go, though not the prettiest. Our team has access to a mill and doesn’t need to cheesehole; however the emergency method is to start drilling holes. Also, just ask around to use someone else’s drill press and cheesehole, as it’s not a tiring as doing it with the hand drill.
We have a drill press; but we would like to drill 2 inch holes.
Then put a 2" holesaw in the drill press…
Rotex punch! but it only works on flat stuff, or the flange of an angled part. You can’t put tubular sections in it.
Yup put a 2" hole saw in the drill press, apply a lot of cutting fluid or grease and just starting chopping. It will probably make a sound like somebody is dying but you’ve just gotta go with it.
Safety Warning: NEVER use a hole saw in metal with a hand-held drill! It CAN be quite dangerous!
A drill press with a 2" hole saw would be fine. Time-consuming, but not difficult.
Learn how to sharpen the hole saw and keep it sharp, every 25 holes or so.
Don
And make sure to clamp down what you are cutting. :ahh:
waterjet
Last year, a friend and I cheeseholed our shooter by using a uni-bit on a regular hand drill
Drill a bunch of little holes with a hand drill?
I wouldn’t recomend doing a lot of little holes with a hand drill it will take you forever.(a 1/4" hole in 1/8" thick aluminum weighs all of .0025 pounds) One thing you can do however depending on the material you’re cheese holing is to drill a couple small holes and then jigsaw them into nice large cutouts. You just have to be careful to not remove too much material this way since it can be easy to get off track with a jigsaw.
We have a mill, but decided to cut out square portions of our chassis with a jigsaw to keep the weight down. Milling would take too much time due to the length of the sections that need to be removed, and we only have one somewhat small and cramped mill/lathe. Ideally, we have 3 or 4 jigsaws so more than one person can work on cutting the pieces out at a time.
The way I cut out a square section in the middle of a sheet of metal is to drill a 3/8" hole on the corner points of the square, so you can fit the jigsaw blade in there to make the cut.
^^^That’s what I think is the easiest method…But…If you have access to an oxy/accetylene torch, you could probably do it pretty quickly…Not sure how well it would do with aluminum though.
plasma cutter.
why do even want to make cheese holes?
if it’s a weight problem you could try something more effective like writing less code in your programing you know those bit and bytes of code weigh alot.
For quick clean nice looking holes in thin material nothing beats a Hougen Rotabroach Cutter. An 11075 set should be in every teams tool box. An 11075 set isn’t too expensive (<$80) and works great even in a hand drill.
that would be way overkill for 1/8 inch aluminum. I have never done it before but it would be easier with a hole saw or step drill.
Aluminum cannot be cut with an oxyacetylene torch, even though I have tried, unsuccessfully.
…With a CNC Turret-Punch machine. 
Watching one of them go ‘ch-plunk, ch-plunk, ch-plunk’ as it not only cuts out all your parts but cheeseholes them at the same time has the same joy as one experiences after using a calculator for the first time in their life, after solely doing long division by hand.