Tested: Adam shows off a machining tool that allows you to make a punched mark in an exact location on a piece of material--especially when precision matters. An optical center punch lets you make a mark right on target, much more accurately than making a mark with just the naked eye.
5 comments:
It’s actually pretty fascinating that sometimes even a fraction of a millimeter is not precise enough for some project. Although I think these projects are few and far between, especially in theatre, the optical center punch seems like the most cost-effective way to get one hundred percent accuracy on a hole. Maybe this hole punch could be used in the theatre when perfect symmetry is absolutely necessary for a design aesthetic. Other than a design aesthetic, what else might you need such high precision for? In theatre, having something tenths of an inch is normally not that big of a deal because our primary purposes are safety and aesthetic which this tenth of an inch would not be a deal-breaker for either especially considering that the aesthetic only needs to be good from far away and it does not really matter what something might look like up close in the theatrical world.
As Adam Savage talks about in the video, center punching before drilling through a piece of metal is super important. Drill bits tend to wander off the point you want it hit if you don't center punch it first. That being said, for most applications, and definitely for any theatrical applications, a spring loaded punch is more than precise. If you are carful a spring loaded punch can most likely getting you within a few thousandths of an inch, pretty precise. That being said, the optical center punch is a pretty cool tool. I do have one major issue with it. The precision of the tool revolves around the user sign able to hold the black holder exactly steady. After using the optical part to line up the device, you have to hold the holder completely still while you pull out the optical part and insert and hammer the punch. When you are talking about thousandths of an inch, the smallest bump during this process will leave you in the same place as the spring punch, a few thousandths off. So...is this really that much better?
I am surprised every time I watch this kind of video… by the fact that, even though I am interested in this field and I do try to inform myself of new inventions, there are still so many tools that I have never seen before or never heard before that are being introduced. As I am learning how to draft, and as I know that how precision can be an extremely important factor - the fact that a small hole could determine whether the team would have to build the entire unit again or not -, it was exciting to learn about optical punch. There was a lot in this merely a 3-minute video, and I like how he demonstrated the usage of the tool in a great detail. One of a very few things that I wonder was that which would be more effective - just buying a more expensive machine or using this tool with human precision. He mentioned the cost of the tool several times, and I was wondering what professionals would choose between more expensive but more guaranteed, or less expensive but need extra efforts.
While I have no need for that tool at the moment, it is really cool. I love how people are inspired to make tools that are already good even better. As Adam was saying, this can be really useful to makers who need that extreme precision that you couldn’t get with a regular center punch. I think the optical center punch could take longer to use than the regular one, but I think the pay off would be worth it and I would assume it would take less time the more you use it. I find it fascinating how simple and smart the actual product is. It utilizes a magnifying cylinder to line up the point that is then switched out with the punch part. Similarly to DJ, I was also thinking about how the user is expected to keep the device steady while moving parts around.
Wow this tool is really niche. I have never seen one before, and never really had a time where I could use one. Granted, in theater we are never doing anything very precise, and in general a regular punch will be more than enough to get the job done for us. This does seem like a tool that Ben Carter would definitely have just to have, and I can not say that I blame him, because it is pretty cool. I wonder if it is hard to keep the body of this punch still while you change out the optical bit for the punch. It seems to me that you could really easily move it off of that mark in between those two steps, but I sure with enough use you would become adept at doing it. This makes me pretty glad that the stuff we build in theater is never that precise. I do not think I would do well at having to deal with such high tolerances all the time.
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