New Tools And A Bracket

In my never-ending quest to expand what I can fabricate, I purchased a set of SPC / Light Racing flared hole dies.  I got a good price on these and as a bonus, they are also highly engineered, using Finite Element Analysis to optimize the angle and radius of the die in order to achieve the maximum depth of flare without cracking the base material.

  

 

My first experiment was with a very thin piece of aluminum sheet I had laying around.  I cut holes in it for all 5 sizes of dies I purchased and used a hydraulic shop press to create the flares.

There's not much to it, but these are great for adding bending and compressive strength to sheet metal pieces.  

My other tool is a battery lug crimper I made for an upcoming solar project.  (More on that later!)  This was a quick test to see if it was possible to achieve a good crimp with minimal time invested.

Sadly this worked, but not as well as I hoped.  The lug is crimped tightly, but the tool cuts into the lug if clamped too hard.  I will try again later when I have more time.


And finally, I received a new Ham radio for Christmas with APRS capability!! (A Yaesu FTM-350ar to be exact.)  But the suction cup mount that came with the head unit absolutely sucks.  It's so bad they give you an adhesive doughnut to stick to your dash because the suction cup can't stick to anything on its own.  Well this just was not going to cut it, so I whipped out a bracket to mount the head unit to the dash via the un-used ash tray.

I'm not sure if I'll leave it here permanently, but it works well and it is easy to push the buttons with my fore finger while shifting gears.