What we did before laser cutting..

Yeah, this was considered an upgrade at the time we bought it. Thing was 1/5th the cost of a laser cutter and one 1/20th the speed and 1/10,000 the versatility.
Took a year to unload this dinosaur at a heavy loss.. Don't be a chump buy a laser... Are you still reading this??

[@engineeredaf1920]

yep us too.

[@turbocobra]

cool old punch!

[@smallshoplasers8785]

Yeah it was a early 1970s V&O 40 ton, had a nice air clutch that you could jog for setup. It was our third mechanical press we had an 8 ton and 10 ton, now I don't have any. The laser requires no tooling and it can nest things to get nearly perfect yield on sheets. We made a fairly large number of dies for blanking, this one is actually one of the slower ones, most of the others ran in continuous like a machine gun.. Dangerous like one too.