Shaking off perforated metal excess - GIF

Shaking off perforated metal excess.

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Previously:

https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...908#post194615
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...493#post197008
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...119#post191581
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...089#post191491
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...827#post194311

Now they can drill and thread all those little squares to 10-32

Never built a die, or seen one intended to punch cover an entire 4'x8' all at once; forming though, yes. The tooling/ tonnage/ maintenance would be immense.
A turret style drives around inducing a pattern, the result could be sheet or squares, maybe 4 to 8 at a time, not such outrageous tonnage or complex tooling. Buu..t, they eject slugs (waste) and blanks (product).
I'm betting on the latter, with the mark in the center very possible to be used as Frank S suggests; tapped like weld-nut, maybe backer washer for a nail, pin or rivet. A lot of products use such things.

Just down the road from where my shop was in Ft Worth there used to be a metal perforating company. They used a roll punch and die set up. Feed a full 4 ft wide sheet of any length into it and out the other end was a sheet full of holes. Along 1 wall they had dozens of punch die cassettes which could be changed out on the machine in a relatively short time . The largest I saw had 18inch diameter rollers with 2" diameter punches the Die rollers were hollow which an spiral auger ran through to remove the slugs. I bought 1000 lbs of 3/16 slugs 3/8" in diameter and 2500lbs of 1/8inch by 20ga slugs for use as shot in a couple of dead blow pile driver hammers the cost was almost nothing. As I recall the Foreman told me the machines, depending on the material of the run they could decoil punch flatten recoil or shear up to 100 feet per minute That's a lot of slugs coming off the line

Agreed. A fly or roll punch is a distinct possibility, just can't quite picture why they're ejecting as a second operation of punch work.
These COULD be plasma or water jet, and keep the pieces out of the catch basin.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Toolmaker51

Agreed. A fly or roll punch is a distinct possibility, just can't quite picture why they're ejecting as a second operation of punch work.
These COULD be plasma or water jet, and keep the pieces out of the catch basin.

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We know that a punch is the only thing that will leave a center mark sans a second operation. My 35 station CNC punch I had in the Middle East had 4 orbital stations. for directional punching. That thing could be programed to make just about any shape or hole pattern even louvers and the knockouts for electrical enclosures or Switch gear panels. Once cut folded spotwelded and painted the only way you could tell one of our products from Square D or others was the custom size to suit the customer's requirements. We could one off produce them economically as well, not cheap but less costly than trying to talk a big name supplier into making custom sized enclosures