Cutting Acrylic Tubing for

Chopper's Battery Box & Foot Drive

When I designed my R2 Battery Boxes I 3D printed the curved ends. It takes about 5.5 hours to print one curved end and they are about 1/2 the height of Chopper's Battery Boxes.

When I announced my intent to cut Chopper's parts from Extruded Acrylic tubing, a number of folks warned me that it was difficult to machine. While I don't disagree, it's both hard and brittle, but I've found it manageable.

This is what happens when UPS drops the box!

To cut the tubing I've extended the table on my chop saw and installed a plastics cutting blade.
Left: After cleaning up the cut edges I've got a set of tubes to be slit lengthwise
To do the Slitting the tube is mounted into a fixture and then clamped onto a sled. The fixture insures that when I turn the tube over the second cut will line up with the first one. The sled keeps my fingers away from the router bit!

I've removed the rear guide from a this router bench and I'm using the guide channel in the front edge to line up the sled.

This is the tube after turning over and making the second cut. It's hard to see but there's a cut line where the V is pointing to above.
Left: A pair of Half tubes ready to go into a Battery Box.

I'm using the same approach, with a modified fixture, to cut the curved 'trench' that I'm using in Chopper's Foot Drive.

If you have access to a CNC machine are are planning to cut your own Chopper parts but don't want to deal with cutting the tubing check the Price List as I'll sell you the cut tubing parts separately.

This design
is copyright Media-Conversions LLC and is made available for non-commercial use only.

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