The New Hotness

Given that Greenlee chassis punches fit the ersatz vacuum tube sockets, this makes a certain perverse sense:

This set of punches is probably worth its weight in, uh, tool steel, because Greenlee got out of the Radio Chassis Punch business quite a while ago:

As far as a Greenlee punch is concerned, a hard drive platter looks a lot like thin aluminum sheet:

I lathe-turned that white bushing to align the hard drive platter around the screw inside the punch. The right way to make that bushing in this day & age definitely involves 3D printing, but I was standing next to the lathe and spotted a nylon rod in the remnants bucket underneath.

The inner ring crumples around the bushing inside the die, while the platter outside remains flat & undamaged through the entire experience.

I match-marked the socket & “plate cap lead” holes on the punched platter and introduced it to Mr Drill Press, but the right way to do that for more than one socket / plate involves a Sherline mill fixture and some CNC.

And then It Just Worked:

That’s obviously a proof of concept; the socket rests on the desk with the rest of the tubes / sockets / Neopixels tailing off to the right. The plate cap lead should pass through a brass tube fitting on the platter, just for pretty.

The 7- and 9-pin sockets have a raised disk that’s slightly smaller than the 25 mm hard drive hole; the easiest fix involves slightly enlarging the disk to match the hole. Although CDs / DVDs have a 15 mm hole and Greenlee punches work surprisingly well on polycarbonate, if I’m going to CNC-drill the screw / wire holes anyway, CNC milling the middle hole should go quickly and eliminate a messy manual process.

Come to think of it, that big tube would look better in the middle of a DVD amid all those nice diffraction patterns from the RGB LEDs in the cap…