Adaptable SWAGE BLOCK

[Seamus]

No sir I'm afraid it didn't make it.
I will send you p.m. with my email

[Ed Weldon]

Food for thought - Waterjet. I gotta tell you guys that there is another way to make one of these things, even in several pieces. Waterjet cutting is ideal. Makes a better edge than a plasma cutter and because the process involves no heat, the surface it creates has the same hardness and machineabiity as the original material. Water jet will leave a small taper on the bottom side of the cut so between that and the surface finish you can still expect some finish work. But you won't hurt tools like drills, reamers, milling cutters, files or chisels. Water jet cuts a pattern into a flat surface and cannot tolerate too much variation in height above the table because the clearance has to be close to focus the waterjet cutting stream. So the pattern is 2 dimensional. This makes it easy to create on a computer. Water jets do not start well over a surface. It's better to start outside the surface and work into it like a scroll saw. And like a scroll saw if you want to end up with a hole it's a lot better to start from inside a drilled hole. The shape of the hole you end up with is whatever you can draw on the computer screen.
Water jet machines are in the same expense category as large CNC machines and need a lot more floor space, not only for the cutter but also the pump filter and system and the supplies of cutting material. And they use lots of power.
The problem with water jets is that job shops that have them tend toward locating in large metropolitan areas. They are less suitable for mass production and more likely to be used for short run equipment and tool building leaving high volume products to other processes like casting, more traditional heavy metal fabrication and odd ball materials that can't be cut by cheaper methods. This makes most of the job shops with water jet cutters open to short run or one-off jobs. Here the key to making such a job economically practical is giving the waterjet shop a clear, clean 2D cad file so they don't have to charge you their shop rate with all it's necessary overhead to do the CAD work for you. Not that they can't. Many of their customers are job shops with their own high labor rates but not the specialized ability to create a 2d file that's good. So they save no money that way and often come out ahead because the waterjet shop already understands the special needs of the job shop. Like where to get the right material which in the case of a hobbyist is something he will likely supply himself. Fortunately mill finishes and flatness of most metal raw materials are better than the flatness and surface requirements of the waterjet cutter.
Ed Weldon, Los Gatos, CA

[Philip Davies]

Thank you for your contribution, Ed. I do not have a water jet, of course, but I wanted to see how I would manage using hand tools (apart from a bent pillar drill)

[tonyfoale]

Not being a smithy I had to look up what a swage block was.