The first 6" of the shear are incredibly dull. Also the current support bar setup isn’t really sufficient for anything other than small parts. It looks like there was significant discussions by @JoeN a few months ago to fix this so if something needs to be machined I can work on that if needed.
Also some of the fingers are worn by ~1mm which causes warping in bends. Not really sure if anything can be done about the other than buying new fingers.
We know about the problems with the shear. I have a steward looking into getting the blade sharpened. But it will be a bit before I can get the material to upgrade the shear support.
But how did the brake fingers get worn? I’ve never heard of a failure mode like that.
I measured the largest finger which is installed at the far right. The inner side was 100mm and the outer side was 99mm. Presumably because it’s close to the handle it gets significantly more use. Fingers in the middle were fine. Unfortunately this causes a variation of a few degrees even over a short 6" piece.
I’m not denying your measurement, but that makes even less sense. You don’t choose a finger based on its location, nor do you use only part of a finger.
So the issue isn’t that the blades are dull. They just need to be shimmed on the far left and right side so that the clearance between the upper and lower is near zero.
The hold down mechanism for the shear is also completely non-functional, and is not even currently installed.
Am I correct in thinking that it is still red tagged?
More like yellow tagged if you avoid the dull areas on the ends and stick to thin sheets that don’t require the clamping bar.
There was a red tag on it on Saturday. It was on the end closest to the outside overhead door. I was looking for it because I wondered if it had been fixed in conjunction with the move into the new space. I was under the impression that it had been red tagged since we encountered the problem with the brake that holds the sheet being cut in place.
It is still red tagged.