The main frame of the Sawppy rover uses off the shelf aluminium extrusions from Misumi, so I thought I’d start with these. After creating a company account with Misumi I ordered 2 x 2m lengths.
£16.52 spent and a couple of days later, they arrived.
Following Roger’s instructions, I started to lay out how to chop these up.
| Extrusion 1 | Extrusion 2 | |
| Cut 1 | 385 mm | 385 mm |
| Cut 2 | 385 mm | 384 mm |
| Cut 3 | 245 mm | 245 mm |
| Cut 4 | 245 mm | 245 mm |
| Cut 5 | 182 mm | 182 mm |
| Cut 6 | 161 mm | 161 mm |
| Cut 7 | 117 mm | 117 mm |
| Cut 8 | 238 mm | 122 mm |
| Cut 9 | 122 mm | |
| Total | 1958 mm | 1964 mm |
So even with a thick sawblade, this should be easily doable with the 2 metre lengths as long as I don’t make any mistakes in measuring…
If I do this with a circular saw, I can make the cuts nice and square, so let’s use this aluminium cutting blade (Erbauer 40 teeth). With its 1.8mm kerf, that still leaves enough room.
Without forgetting the mantra to ‘measure twice, cut once’ I also bound together cuts of the same length and did them all at once to get them perfectly the same.
This was my first time cutting aluminium with a circular saw and it was rather satisfying, the edges of those cuts are beautiful and I got the cuts to within half a millimetre accuracy (well within the tolerance needed).
I think this new blade is staying on that machine, even for wood. As calculated, minimum wastage was produced.
Ok, so I’ve now got the easy bit out of the way and I can already get a feel for the size of the rover from these parts. Next time, it’s making a start on the 150ish hours of 3D printing required, so I’ll set these pieces to one side for now. It’s so much easier to store them when they’re chopped up 🙂
