burrs

It is a nice tool. Just be aware that the part that is punched out is slightly tented.

Don't forget, 5880 has a plastic film over the copper. Best to remove it before you try to glue or solder the disc. Learn from my experience! :-)

Mikek

I have some sheets of sample microwave laminates. Most feel like copperclad leather. The good (low loss) ones have terrible copper adhesion.

I also have some nice ebay copperclad kapton which is occasionally useful. Copperclad stuff is cheap on ebay.

I don't recall having any adhesion problems, but I know I can get the copper off with a hot soldering iron when I want to. Yes the PTFE PCB is very flexible, I suspect I could bend a 16" piece into a circle.

The really low-loss stuff is micro-inch smooth on both sides of the copper foil. You don't need heat to peel it. The black oxide treatment on most boards glues the copper to the epoxy-glass nicely, but adds a lot of loss at high frequencies.

That's a clone of the old Whitney #5 Junior punch. Good for 1/16" - 9/16 " disks (the punches have a centering point, you'd want to grind that off to make disks, "blanking").

The bevel angle and clearance for good fiberglass shearing is different than for sheet metal; it's best to maintain two shears for the two materials. Rust not required.

For $18 you can get an 8 x 16 sheet of Roger 5880 and punch about 2000

You can also cut rectangles with a pair of scissors. Fiskars has handheld punches to cut discs of 1/16", 1/8" and 1/4" here for $8 with free delivery.

Mikek

Where is "here"?

I had a Whitney punch once, a lot like this one:

It shook the building when it punched big holes in steel control console panels. I wrote a compiler (in Basic) to help the machinists program it. We debugged the compiler very carefully.

The controller was all TTL logic. It used a very DDS-like algorithm to create motion vectors.

Glad your paying attention.

Mikek