Cutting alum sheet with a draw knife

[huntaero]

I was working with our sheet metal guru on our wings and he showed me how to cut the trailing edge skin at the aft end of the wing using a straight edge and a draw knife. We clamped the straight edge along our dimension line at the trailing edge of the wing and used a draw knife multiple times to score the alum sheet almost all the way thru, basically until you could feel the knife starting to come thru the alum. Then we simply bent the straight edge down and the skin broke off at the score line, leaving a perfectly straight cut with no distortion, just a little bit of a burr to file off.

[bergy]

In an earlier life when I worked in construction and industrial maintenance, I found that most any tool used in woodworking can also be used when working with aluminum. I often use a carpenter's plane (either a small block-plane or sometimes large jack-plane) for cutting/trimming sheet aluminum. Most recently I used a plane on the corners of my gas-tanks after riveting and just before welding to make for a uniform appearance on the finished welds.