From my house, on a sunday at midnight, I could make Portland in a bit under 5 hours. But during the day, with pee breaks, lunch, and gas, thats a 12 hour round trip easy, and if traffic is "normal" in Seattle or down by Fort Lewis, could easily be 14. way too far for me to pickup a crappy 5 ton. And the truck would eat a hunnert bucks of gas these days. People (usually aging machine shop owners who never use em) been trying to unload those little tabletop punch press things on me since the early 80s. I dont want one.
But thats not my point- My point is, to make a comparable tool to the one you can buy, is a lot more complicated than buying a 50 year little press.
I have a lathe and a mill, sure. But no surface grinder, heat treating oven, or edm.
And to make decent cutoff dies, thats usually the tools they use.
Especially for that itty bitty sized wire.
OP wants unblemished, unsquashed ends.
I could make some half usable cutoff dies, which would be half as accurate, if I really worked on it. I would much prefer to buy accurate, heat treated ones, in a nice proven die holding system, made by somebody who does it for a living and who I can complain to if they dont work.
I could cludge together some kinda ebay measuring tool into a length readout, and make some kind of micrometer stop, too, I suppose.
I would use an air cylinder, stead of a mechanical punch press, quieter and smaller and just nicer to sit at for hours.
And then put it all together, figure out why its wonky, take it apart a few times and rebuild it, til I finally get it right.
But Why?
I am not in business to save money. I am in business to make money.
That means the stuff I can do well, that I am tooled to do, that other people cant do, is what I wanna spend my shop time on.
I had a project a few years ago where we had to melt together the ends of a few thousand 400 strand 1/4" diameter stainless cables, so they wouldnt unravel.
Yeah I coulda bought some weird WW2 surplus giant induction machine from HGR, had it shipped from Ohio, made some air clamps and timers and "saved" some money.
Instead, I found a company that makes em, in Ma., and rented one by the month for six months. Cost TWO HUNDERED DOLLARS A MONTH! my grandpa wouldda had a heart attack.
Was the best money I ever spent. Plug it in, turn it on, does the exact job I want, every time. Somebody else spent a few years refining the design, finding the best suppliers for every part, and even getting the damn thing UL certified.
I done my share of building things that simply arent available, but for something like this, when you can buy one with a built in wire straightening section, spool holders for the sizes wire actually comes in, accurate length stops, off the shelf dies for all the wire sizes you need, plug and play, its kinda a no brainer to me. I know that today, with there being hardly any place within 2 hours of me that sells springs or fasteners or end mills or solenoid air valves or does heat treating, these kind of projects are WAAY more time consuming and costly then they were when I lived in LA in the 80s.
Even finding used machines is really different. When I moved to LA in 84, there were 2 dozen used machinery places with hundreds of machines on the floor. Now- well, theres Sterling... Santa Fe down in Vernon used to have a half dozen in a 2 block stretch. I think Century might still be there.
I dont need to prove to myself how handy I am any more. I fix stuff all the time you cant get parts for, I already impressed myself enough...
By the way- do you actually have a shop, either in China or on your tug boat? I thought these days you just do a bit of import export and consulting. Could you really do this in 2 weeks, or is that bench racing?
