RST Engineering wrote:
Depends entirely on what tolerance you are marking/cutting/bending to. I
want my students to be able to cut/bend to ten thousandths accurately and
the only way to do that is to scribe.

If you can bend aluminum to a 1/10,000" tolerance
you are the MAN. You must have some really
talented students.

When I was building parts we could machine to +/-
..001" and grind or polish to +/- .0005" on a very
expensive part. Likewise for drilling you could
drill to +/-.001 and ream and polish to +/-.0003
or so.

A very fine tip pencil leaves a line that is .004"
wide--which is also the thickness of a piece of
20# bond paper. A very fine tipped scribe
probably leaves a line in the Dyekem that is .002"
wide. You would have to measure it under a
microscope to be sure.

I'm really pleased to hear that technology has
progressed such that sheet metal can be bent to a
tolerance of +/- .0001". That is 2.54 microns
which is down in the area of the metal linewidths
of the semiconductor chips in your computer.

Wow, who would have thought.

or maybe you meant .010?? ;-)

Don W.