For those people drilling Teflon for slides you
 are going to need a Brad point drill.
 A regular drill makes a mess of it.
 http://www.wlfuller.com/html/short_length_brad.html

 Paul Lamar


 Paul

 Have you tried a water cutter?

 Rick
 www.precisioncut3D.com <http://www.precisioncut3d.com/


 Yes I have used them before for cutting intake manifold
 flanges. They work great.

 However cutting this Teflon is something everybody
 assembling our
 slide throttle kits will need to do at home. The straight
 parts can be cut with scissors but the small holes need to
 be drilled.
 The large 1 7/8th holes can be cut with an exacto knife as
 the material
 is soft and only .032 thick.

 Paul Lamar



 With 0.032 thick Teflon, a Roper Punch should work nicely.

One thing I hate about machining Teflon, you can not sneak up on it.

For aluminum, I just do rough cuts until 0.050" away from it. Then
a series of 0.010" cuts. Finally shave 0.001" off on final passes.

With Teflon if I'm not removing 0.025" per pass, it just slide along
the cutter!  My only solution has been to set the boring bar to size
with scrap aluminum, cut the Teflon, measure and readjust the boring
bar and go town.

Any tips you can pass along?

Tom

Nothing other than that. We won't be doing a lot of cutting
thick Teflon from now on. The new slide throttle uses
the thin stuff which saves about $100.


Paul Lamar

Paul, two homebrew ideas I use for cutting gaskets and pattern aluminum
(flashing from lowes) for antique motorcycles. The first is fabricated from
roller chain links, I cut on of the two pins of a conector to half length
and at 60 degrees with a 4 inch angle grinder. Put the long pin into one of
the holes in  the roller link, put the material between the sharpened pin
and the hole in the roller and the long pin guides the cut. I hae an
assortment of chain link cutters from 50 chain to 140 chain. It makes a
clean  shearing cut that I don't get with the store bought punch sets. I
also welded some 1/2 X 1-1/2 flatbar together about  12 inches long with a
1/2 inch short spacer at one end. Then you drill through both flat bars with
any size of holes you use. for the punch dies I use the transfer punch set.
this deal allows punching farther from the material edge and the points on
the transfer punch allow precise visual allignment over the center marks
which is a black art with my chain link cutters.

george grimes