I don't know how well it'd work in practice but with only access to rudimentary equipment I'd be inclined to bond the strip of steel between 2 lengths of MDF, say 9mm and make up a jig and fence and run a conventional router with a 90 deg cutter along it. A TCT router cutter should cope with 1mm steel OK in such a sandwich.

pgk

Put a grinding wheel in the proxxon drill. Set the (a) fence at 90 degrees to where you have it now and the correct distance from the wheel.

With the grinding wheel flat you could do the back edge, Tilt the wheel to 45 degrees reset the distance to the fence and grind the chamfer. You should have enough power for 1mm steel sheet.

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 22/03/2021 23:36:14

Come on Jeff, get real He has very little kit and no room for even a small mill let alone a surface grinder He is asking for advice. Not a scathing unhelpful comment from someone who obviously has a lot of kit

If you want to set an exacyt angle then a sine bar as has been suggested is the way to go to mount the work.

If however you are looking to make a mitre that will join to make a 90 degree corner then I suggest you mount the two pieces square to each other and run a cutter between them to acieve two exactly matching bevels. If one is off by half a degree the other will compensate by being off in the other direction. It always helps if you give some details of what you are trying to make.

regards Martin

The real question is how accurate does "exact" imply? Until that is quantified then what kit one may, or may not, have is irrelevant.

Andrew

I was referring to the material of the cutter that is doing the cutting. If you look at cutters on the Dremel site you will see cutters with the letters HSS, which stands for high speed steel, and others may say carbide and again diamond. HSS and carbide cutters are usually solid metal, carbide is a sintered powder usually harder than HSS when formed. Some cutters are diamond coated which is used for lighter cuts in hard materials.

If you are cutting sheet steel then HSS might be adequate at least for trials when roughing then use a diamond wheel to finish to get the accuracy you want. Holding the piece perfectly parallel to the cutter is the key to achieve what you want so a little fixture with pins and clamp would do and slide it along a guide under the fixed cutter.

How about a different approach?

First, cut your steel into pieces of the size required but leaving say 5mm on the edge where the 45 degrees is required. Find yourself a slab of steel with a good flat face, big enough to accommodate the full length of the 45 edge, and ensure that is is properly flat – perhaps get a local engineering firm to do this bit. While you are there, ask them if they could prepare a bar of tool steel with 5 faces – like a long shed with flat floor and walls, and a roof at 45 degrees each side. This should be hardened and tempered. The cost of doing this will be way less than buying new machinery.

Then you need a big solid vice, or a bottle jack, and add some ingenuity, so you have some way of forcing the roof of the 5-sided bar into the steel plates at exactly the right position, one at a time, until the edge is cut away. This will mark the slab each time, so move across the surface with each piece to avoid marking the back of the workpiece.

This should give you edges which are as accurately 45 degrees as the tooling itself. Wrap some fine wet-&-dry paper round a flat file and run this along the finished edges to remove any burrs. The sharper the roof edge and the flatter the slab, the more tidy will be the product.

Hope this helps

Cheers, Tim

.

John

I have resisted the temptation to participate in this discussion, until now … and I am making just one comment, which I hope you will accept as supportive :

Your 'actual question' used the term "EXACTLY" … but now you have downgraded to "We emphatically don't need perfection, we just need it to be as accurate as we can get it within reason."

Before asking people to 'focus on the specific issues and actual questions'; you might like to consider how many orders of magnitude that change of specification embraces.

MichaelG.

Coming in late, as usual

Cutting by hand is MOST unlikely to result an edge at "exactly 45 degrees"My suggestion would be to cut /file the strip to width (making the minimum allowance for the 45 degree chamfer, ) with the ends square to the straight face.

The illustration of the machine ( 23/3/2021 12:36 ) shows a T slot along one side of the Table. That is the ideal means of clamping a fence in position.. The fence may need to be wide enough for the workpiece to overhang the edge so that the grinding wheel can pass below the level of the top of the Table.

The fence can also be used as the basis for the clamps used to hold the workpiece…

Running a small grinding wheel along the outer edge, with the "pistol drill" set over at 45 degrees would seem to be the method.

This would allow a long strip to be ground, so that it could then be sheared to provide several lengths, with the required chamfer.. The long strip can then be sheared to produce the lengths required.

Shearing across the sheet may well produce a burr which will need tom be removed by gentle use of a swiss file or a diamond file.

The grinding wheel will wear, so the vertical position of the "pistol drill" will need to be slightly (The wheel will only be operating over metal of just less than 1.5 mm width&nbsp adjusted regularly to present an unworn part of the wheel to the workpiece. Hopefully, one grinding wheel may last long enough to do all 32. If unsure, lay in a store of wheels.

Howard