Hi, her-indoors bought a blind from Ikea and asked me to put it up, and I needed to cut the metal tube it rolled on. For the first cut I used a hacksaw, but it left so much jagged metal that I cut it again. I used a junior hacksaw freehand this time, trying to cut on a line I'd drawn. The blade bent and buckled so much that the end was in and out when I'd finished. What tool should I have used? |F
Ang^H^H^H
You could have roughly cut it slightly over-length and then filed it down.
Or used a dremel with cutting disk
Perhaps the saw blade wasn't a good one - or was too coarse.
Or the blade was not in sufficient tension?
Were there no instructions with the blind?
I used a hacksaw; the cut was a bit jagged but when the plastic end was put on it concealed any minor imperfections.
I also filed any sharp bits.
Junior hacksaw should be fine as long as the blade is sharp and under tension.
One thing - IIRC I clamped the metal bit in my Workmate to keep it stable whilst I cut. This stopped it flexing during cuttting and made cutting a straight(ish) line easier. These metal bits are medium flimsy so a firm grip on them is essential.
HTH
Dave R
Use this as an excuse to treat yourself to a Dremel and once you have it, use one of the cutting discs - brilliant job, done in minutes with no bother at all.
John
Plumber's pipe cutter?
That's probably what I'd have used as well altho' the diameter of the pipe isn't known .
Adjustable pipe cutter then.
Adasm
I've just fitted a couple of metal-tubed blinds, one from Ikea, one from Argos. The tubes were around 3/4" diameter, very thin steel, and had a clenched seam. They were sods to cut with a junior hacksaw, even rotating the tube so that there were always several teeth in contact with steel. The blind fabric is already attached so solutions involving flying sparks are perhaps inappropriate (so not the chop saw), and I suspect the seam would give a pipe-cutter problems.
Thats what I use + hacksaw on the seam.
They were in brail
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Hmm ........... no-one's come up with the answer I would use without any doubt -- bandsaw with a fine metal-cutting blade. I keep an old BBS20 set up permanently for such jobs.A perfect result every time.
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