Making perfect circular holes - The professional way

Built and written by Vegard "cyclopX0r" Lunna
Published 14 March 2001

With a dremel it's easier to make a square hole (or atleast one with straight edges) than a circular one, It's a fact. But, there are several ways to skin a cat, in this guide I will show you a more professional attempt on it, with some quite heavy gear.
Here is the preperation tools you need after you decided and marked the center-piont of the sircle:

An hammer and a center marker to mark your center before you start.	One hell of a big machine...

The machine is a nibbler shearing machine, but we like to refer to it as the nipple machine, as of norwegian reasons :) a beast weighing in at approx. 1 ton. It's old, but still working smoothly.
Don't get this wrong. You're not supposed to run off and buy one of these things. I haven't got one either, this belongs to my school. The monster only does circles, but it does perfect ones fast (about 15-20 seconds)

So let's get started...

After making an center hole you put the steelplate in the machine, justify the machines center edge to your center hole and adjust it to cut your wanted diameter.

Something like this...

Then you start turning yer steelplate slowly around, the whole 360 degrees, minding yer ten fingers and wearing all that safety-crap I didn't wear.

I'm pretty good at operating it huh? :)

And then you got yourself and near perfect circular hole at around 15-20 secs. The final result lookes something like this:

Look's great to me.

I'm sure you noticed that the victim-plate used in this article was a dummy? I used this machine to make a hole in the side of my case some time ago, and the result looked like this.

There are several approaches to cutting like this, if you're accept finding a machine-shop to do it for you. An alternative is plasma cutting, and the most hi-tec ones uses laser :) More on that later if my school have the budget to buy one when this old piece dies...

Discuss this in our forums!