Simple louver tools

[Wray Schelin]

While at Dutch Comstock's CopperMeet last early Spring , Stan Lobitz
showed everyone a very simple louver tool that works very effectively
and is realitive easy to make with no need for an expensive deep throat press.

Here is a picture of the louver tool.


As you can see you only need to clamp the tool in a vise and then whack it good with a hammer. You index the louvers with a simple guide clamped on with vise grips. to make longer louvers you just slide the panel in the die and recut.

Here is a picture of the die which uses a plastic insert as the female lower part of the die.



Wray

[JonD]

Hi Wray,

Thanks for reposting the photo's.

I've been thinking about this since stan originally posted it way back when, How to construct the male punch part seems to be the tricky part :

What type of steel would be required for the male punch. Perhaps tool steel. This could then be shaped with a grinder.

My next question would be how to fix the punch to the mounting plate. Drilling tool steel seems almost impossible so perhaps silver soldering it to something you could actually drill and tap may be the answer.

What do you think ?

Regards

Jon

[Gene_Olson]

Originally Posted by JonD

What type of steel would be required for the male punch. Perhaps tool steel. This could then be shaped with a grinder.

That is a whole 'nother field. There are so many tool steel alloys and there is a lot of good tool steel in junked parts. (like springs)
What tools do you have to work it with?

Originally Posted by JonD

My next question would be how to fix the punch to the mounting plate. Drilling tool steel seems almost impossible so perhaps silver soldering it to something you could actually drill and tap may be the answer.

If you have already shaped a piece of hardened tool steel, you might be able to weld it to a plate with nickel rod. Another option might be to buy it annealed, drill, tap and shape it and then harden and temper it. (you could test the tool on soft aluminum before hardening)
Some steels are made to be water hardening, others oil hardening, and some even air hardening. Water is a fast quench, oil slower, air slowest. If you quenched an air hardening steel in water, it might explode from the stress.

That said, if you already have your punch formed out of regular low carbon steel, it still can be hardened somewhat and will last for a while. The key to that is even faster cooling than regular water. Salt water cools faster, but the olde time recipes for that used lye (very dangerous, bad chemical burns, blind guys) Rob Gunter looked at it and developed a variation using table salt and detergents to change the surface tension of the liquid so it grabbed onto the metal better.
You see when you quench something the water, oil is vaporised next to it and that vapor acts as insulation, slowing the quench.
a surficant or detergent helps the liquid slide past the bubbles and rewet the surface.

Search for "Super Quench" on the web.

Tempering is drawing back the hardness to a point were the steel is tougher and less brittle.

G

[Wray Schelin]

Hi Jon,

If you are cutting louvers in aluminum you could make the louver tool out of mild steel. Aluminum cuts very easy compared to steel. For long tool life and longer intervals beteen sharpenings you're best to use at least 4140 steel or a tool steel. A-2 tool steel is a good choice because it remains very stable after heat treating.

Whenever you use a tool steel you first make the tool with the steel in the annealed state then heat treat it. The male cutter of the louver die is threaded, same for the female die assembly.

You could make the louver die with a just hacksaw, drill press, and a 4.5" angle body grinder. You can buy preground annealed tool steel in the right sizes for both the male and female parts of the die. Any industrial supply house will supply you with A-2 tool steel, you can also find it on Ebay.

You could make a trail run of the die set first with mild steel, then upgrade to A-2.

The plastic insert stock is also easy to find on Ebay.

Cost for all of the materials would not be much. You might also be able to do the heat treat yourself, but there is a danger of getting the dies too hard and then having them crack.

Wray

[JonD]

hi Gene, Wray

Thanks for you quick responses.

The grade of the steel and wether it is annealed or not I had not considered. I was trying to visualize making the punch out of stuff I already had lying about. The reason I talked about using hardened tool steel is that I've already got some blank tool steel for making lathe tools from so was considering that since its square and hard.
I appreciate that it may be less effort getting some annealed steel and using this. Any time savings are great as none of us have enought time !!!!!

I like the idea of prototyping the punch out of mild steel, the benefits being that you would of made 95% of the finished punch with only fine tuning of the dies to be done if required.

I try to avoid posting questions like this as I'm not in the position to try this out for a couple of months due to other commitments and don't like 'wasting' other peoples time. I greatly appreciate your responses and will take them on board when I get round to building it.

Regards

Jon

[mr.c]

When I bought my pullmax,there was a small punch press that I was thinking about getting. It had a ton of tooling. Amongst the tooling was louver dies. The male punch was made from brass. Brass cutter on a steel mounting plate. I don't remember what the female die was. I passed on the machine since I didn't have a place to put it. I told someone else about it and it now belongs to a metal shaper in Ocala,FL.

[Tinman]

Just made these today and they work good.

Hey Tinman!!! That's SLICKER than snot on a doorknob!!!!

I always wondered about makign those for my beadroller. I see I NEED to get on the ball and get going!!!

I even wondered if it'd be worth the time to make an additional roller with "x" amount of groove to allow that "pressed in look"


Just thinking and admiring out loud!!!



Jacin in Ohio


SOMB

[Dick Bear]

Wray,

Looks like Stan Lobitz and I have more in common than our interest in racing. I hadn't seen this post before today but you'd think that we (Stan and I) had used the same napkin to design our louver cutter.

That's amazing!

Just goes to show you why 80% of patent applications are eliminated during the Patent Search phase ... and why only 3-5% of the remaining 20% are ever awarded a patent following the Examiner's review. So many clever individuals in the world, it seems someone has already done it in at least 97% of the time.

Dick Bear

[r.w.dewar]

I have been enjoying the posts on cycle kart builds and really enjoyed seeing your and Stans louver cutters. Way back around 1960 a friend of mine built such a setup to punch a pile of louvers in the hood of his customized 1950 Ford coupe. It was quit a job to organise, some one holding and someone else swinging the hammer. But it turned out good. Thanks, Bob.