Low cost ways of working with aluminium for a n00b

[Stonelesscutter]

Google "JB Weld". This is the cheaper part of the job.

Thanks Doddy!

I had good hopes for the J-B Weld when I read your comment and was thinking it might be a good thing to use to put together the inner cube-shaped frame to mount the side plates on. After work however, I went through a bunch of Youtube videos and my first impression was that it's pretty messy. Maybe that's because the people who made the videos were just doing a shoddy job, I don't know. But at the end of a lot of the videos, when it came to testing the bond, they proved to fail. So at the moment, I'm not exactly sold on this technique, although I will definitely be keeping it in mind. I'll be trying to come up with some sort of alternative though.

Interesting. This is where, if you wanted to, you could sink an awful lot of money.

I might agree with you to an extent about the use of flat sheets of ali. You may want to research two finishing technologies that may go hand in hand with what you're trying to do - "shot peening" and "anodising", particularly if this is going to be an aesthetic piece. This is likely work you'd want to farm out once you have your panels cut. Your point of making a skeleton and bolting the plates to this does offer an easy-out for this, and you can get the Ali sheets guillotined reasonably accurately by most metal suppliers. Add your holes, then erase your markings with the peening process and hard-anodise to get a durable and sexy finish.

Yeah, I agree that the finish is the last of my worries right now. That said, I had to look into shot peening and anodising as you suggested. Both are things which I would have to outsource, like you said. The shot peening seems to be mainly for relieving the metal from inner stresses which might cause it to warp. Anodising looks like a sweet option. But these panels are a lot bigger than the small parts I've seen people do in videos. I imagine this could be quite a costly affair. Any idea of what having this done might cost?

While looking up videos, I came across some nice ways of finishing aluminium. Just wanted to share two videos.

https://youtu.be/cpMetNWS98E

https://youtu.be/NBpfa3fcmZc

Widening holes is easy (files, etc). It's filling them in afterwards that's trickier. Get everything fitting properly before looking at the finishing processes.

Good to know this can be done, thanks! I've been looking for videos about using simple hand tools to cut aluminium, but it seems they are hard to find. What I did find out is that apparently you need to be careful what you use to cut it, as the relative softness of the metal can cause the space between saw teeth to become clogged up.