Making Sparkles not Sparks
I am a woodworker at heart, but I do have some 6061 aluminum sitting around the shop. I used it to make a wooden PC case for Gigabyte that went to CES last year but it needs a new job. I have a couple of sheets of aluminum yet but I need an idea on what to do with them. The limits I have is…well, I am a piddly little woodworker. I had to cut the last Aluminum sheet with an angle grinder and a straight edge after utterly failing with my X-Carve.
This post is part of a paid partnership with the Home Depot and contains affiliate links.
Home Depot sent me over these metal cutting blades from Diablo as part of the Home Depot Prospective and now instead of sparks I make glitter, The nice thing about this blade is that it allows you to work with metals basically the same way you would with wood (touch your nose, as my kids say.) These blades use Diablo’s patented Cermet 2 teeth to cut through ferrous and non-ferrous metals without even heating up,
The blades only work on metal up to about ⅛” thick but this is perfect for metal studs, c-channel, sheet steel or sheet aluminum, all of the kinds of metal a hobbyist is going to use in a project.
This really opens up my horizons, the coldness of metal really does a great job of balancing out the warmth of wood when making modern minimalists designs, you can also use the tensile strength of metal to add thin supports to thinner wood to prevent flexing when positioned in the right orientation. I watched a really interesting video by Jeremy Fielding exploring a lot of the engineering techniques around material usage and orientation if you want to learn more about the use of metal vs. wood.
I’m a big fan of these new metal cutting blades from Diablo and while I am trying to avoid the temptations of the ferrous sex, I may just tiptoe my way into some metalic wizardry sometime in the next year.
Please join me on my journey through woodworking and on into other crafts, I have a YouTube channel and lots of other content you can explore on social media. Find me by searching WoodWorkLIFE on any of your favorite platforms.
Thanks for reading, and please check out the affiliate links to the products featured in this article. The metal cutting blades from Diablo can be found on HomeDepot.com with free in store pickup and delivery on orders over $45. You can pickup the 5 ½” cermet blade for just $30 or the 6 ½” version for just $35 depending on which saw you have. Home Depot also carries a dedicated metal cutting circular saw from Makita so you can capture all those sparkles in the saw instead of finding them on all of your woodworking projects for the rest of your life.
