corsair hinge cap die

I can't remember if I blogged about the first part of this earlier as I did half of this work during a really busy time in the semester...

I started this die after visiting Scott Dennison's shop and looking at a piece for the aileron hinge cap on the corsair warplane restoration. Scott provided me with some files from the microfiche so I could try and reproduce the dies necessary to create this .040 aluminum piece. It didn't take too long to get the drawing into Rhino and then I was able to create some surfaces to work with that I could create the dies from. I worked on the female portion of the die as I happened to have some leftover pvc (machines nicely and Scott uses this for a lot of his metal shaping dies) from Jim Hinze's architecture grad work stash. I didn't have a piece for the taller male die, but I figured I would pick up a piece fairly soon. I wrote the code for cutting the female die and then quickly cut it out. I think I sent Scott some pics and a message to let him know I had cut the die and also to share a copper piece that Jim Hinze had cut earlier as a test piece at Kenilworth for us to test a similar technique a few years earlier. I told hime I would cut the male portion as soon as I had material. 

Fast forward to last week (several months later); I finally have the male portion cut. I ended up needing to adjust the file to offset the surface to allow for material thickness and I hope that I did this right as it was a while since I had visited the file and I couldn't remember my initial workflow on this. Hopefully the male portion is correct, but if not, it's an easy fix. I cut this in nylon and it turned out well. There was a bit of stress in the material from cutting/clamping so the bottom of the die is a little warped but it should work one the pressure is on in the hydraulic press. I feel like a complete looser for taking so long on this; I just couldn't get my act together. I'll try to get this over to Scott soon so he can test things out.