Table Saw Mounted Sheet Metal Nibbler

This is yet another video of the making-tools-for-an-upcoming-project flavor. This time, I'm planning to make a small standing-seam roof to protect my electrical panel from the weather, and I want to fabricate it entirely from the damaged panels I recently removed from the shed.

There's more than enough material, and the panels themselves are kind of a no-brainer. Many of them are mostly fine, so I just need to cut short sections from the good areas, then snap them together to make the bulk of the roof.

The tricky bit is the perimeter. A standing seam roof needs drip edge, cleats, ridge caps, etc to function properly. The whole system needs to shed water not just off of the sloped roof deck, but around and away from the underlying structure so that nothing that shouldn't get wet, does (there may have been a more confusing way to write that sentence, but I'm not sure what it would have been).

That is to say, I need to make trim. Again, I have a fair bit of more-or-less undamaged steel, I just need a way to cut it into strips of various widths. I can then fold and fit those strips to do all the things I need done.

Enter the nibbler. The first time I worked with steel roofing, I did 100% of the cutting with snips. You can do it that way and get good results. But man is it a pain in the ass. For round two I experimented with some circular-saw tricks and had modest success (check it out here if you missed it:    • Damaged Standing Seam Steel Roof Replacement  ). For this revision three, I want to try using a nibbler.

I bought a cheap one that is drill-powered. It's really just a tiny little hole-punch that runs at high speed, and you can feed your sheet metal into it as it punches out little crescent moon shapes, resulting in a cut. There's very little heat, the cut edge is surprisingly nice (no jagged edges, no burr), and the little punch thingy (technical term) is totally finger-safe. It's a fantastic tool.

It doesn't especially like to go straight, though.

If you WANT to cut curves, that's a great feature. Lots of metal-cutting tools can't do that. But me? I pretty much just want straight lines.

So I made an adapter plate to mount the nibbler to the router-table on my table saw. Bam! Now I can use the fence and cross-cut sled built into the table saw to quickly and accurately set up cuts and smoothly guide my sheets through the nibbler, keeping the cuts straight. Well, straight-ish. It isn't perfect, but it's definitely good enough for my purposes and was a huge asset to my imminent tiny-roof project. Watch this space for that video soon.