Goat Tool Day 11

blaineg posted some pics said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 7:53am ET

Nibbles!

Need to cut out odd shapes or holes in sheet metal (or other hard material), but tin snips won’t fit? Need to drill a square hole? This is the tool for the job.

Just drill a small hole (1/4" or 3/8" depending on the tool) and you can make a square hole in the middle of a panel. Or start nibbling from the edge

The one above is a manual nibbler, and costs around $10. But you can upgrade to fancier manual nibblers, or powered versions if you’ve got a real appetite for metal. Some of the powered ones have large heads though, so you’ll need a much larger starting hole.

Drill adapter:

Electric:

Pneumatic:

https://www.allelectronics.com/item/nct/nibbler/cutter/1.html

7 comments, 2 replies
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blaineg said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 7:54am ET:

Demo of three kinds of nibblers.

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walarney said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 9:23am ET:

All Electronics! Another site that can have one dreaming up projects for an hour or two.

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- @walarney Their actual store isn’t very big, but it’s an electronics tinkerer’s paradise.
  
  narfcake said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 1:19pm ET
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- @narfcake @walarney I’ve never been to the store, but I love the site, and I’ve been a customer for years.
  
  blaineg said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 6:34pm ET
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macromeh said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 11:29am ET:

The bio-nibbler:

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djslack said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 12:17pm ET:

I have a project I’m working on right now and this reminded me that a nibbler would be the perfect tool for the job. I had the one pictured at the top years ago. I wonder if it’s in storage.

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duodec said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 12:34pm ET:

I bought one years ago when I was building SCSI arrays for my home server out of removed server hot swap drive cages. I’d mount 4 drive cages into failed tape drive external housings and add a fan on top for cooling, which required the hole.

After about 45 minutes nibbling at what must have been AR500 armor plate and breaking the nibbler, I took the case covers to a welding shop and had them plasma cut for $10 apiece. These were old American made enclosures that held Japanese made tape drives and you could tell they weren’t chinese junk… they would probably have held up a 250 pound person without noticing.

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ruouttaurmind said Mon, Mar 11th 2019 at 5:11pm ET:

There is no sheet metal project which can’t be conquered with: nibblers, brake, wheeling machine (english wheel), and a welder.

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hamjudo said Tue, Mar 12th 2019 at 10:51am ET:

If you plan to nibble flat stuff, you can make a power nibbler table. Mount the nibbler under the table with the active part of the head sticking up through a hole. This way you can use both hands to guide the work.

It is also one of the safer power tools. Nibblers don’t remove fingers like a saw, or fling the work piece around. They don’t distort the sheet metal like tinsnips.

You still have to worry about the sharp edges of cut sheet metal.

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