I'm
looking for D-shell hole punches, [...]; (b) the seller must
take phone or fax orders - I can tolerate looking for things on the
Web, but I will _not_ pay over the Web; [...]
RS components (that's not Radio
Shack) certainly used to sell them,
and probably stil ldo. However, unless you have a trade account, you
_have_ to pay by credit card ontheir web site.
Someone else will get my business, then; they've just opted themselves
completely out of consideration for me.
But snce RS are one of the large trade component
suppliers in the UK,
since they've been around for _many_ years, I have no qualms at all
about doing that.
Distrust of the merchant is a comparatively small part of the reason I
refuse to pay "online". A larger part is that I have no SSL support;
an even larger part is that I know too much about the technology and
don't trust it. The CA chain is insanely weak and nobody publishes
their server key via anything even vaguely out-of-band. Web hosts are
routinely pwn3d, and there is comparatively little case law on who's
responsible for any resulting losses (I'm sure there is some by now,
but the technology is very new compared to phone orders; there simply
hasn't been time to accumulate enough case law to keep me happy). And
while I recognize that many vendors will simply have the phone clerk
type the card number into their webform, (a) if that goes wrong *they*,
not *I*, are at fault, if fault there is found to be, and (b) there is
an at least moderately good chance that the phone clerk does so on
their intranet rather than on their world-facing webserver, rendering
it at least somewhat more secure. (I suppose some of this comes down
to distrust, but it's distrust in the sense of my not trusting them to
use the technology right rather than my not trusting them to be
non-malicious.)
Perhaps it's another aspect of some of the personality traits that make
me a classiccmper - a liking for "too simple to break", a liking for
"been around long enough to be comparatively well known"....
Be warned these punches are not cheap. I have the DB
size one, and
it cost me over \pounds 100.00.
I'm not surprised. I would be suspicious of anything under $100, and I
expect to pay more like $200-$300. (If I go ahead and buy, that is.)
With the RS one, you [...]
I'd be slightly concerned about repeated drilling through the template
enlarging its holes slightly each time the drill bit brushes the side
of the template hole; I might make my own duplicate template....
It's not as fast as a punch tool in a press, of
course, but it sure
beats filing it out by hand.
Or even dremelling it...I just did that (dremel, with file touchup),
and it makes me tend towards the position that, even if it makes no
_economic_ sense for someone who wouldn't use it every day to buy a
multi-hundred-dollar punch, the hassle it'll save me, over all the
holes I make with it in the future, makes it worth it.
Incidentally, is anyone familiar with a treatment for aluminum that
renders the surface nonconductive? The housing I made this hole in is
made of aluminum - but I got a surprise when I was working with it and
checked resistance to the housing and got infinity (which means more
than about 40 megohms, for that meter). For a while I thought it might
be plastic, but it dremels like aluminum, and it turns out that if I
stick the ohmmeter leads on the cut surfaces it conducts fine - the
insulation must be a surface treatment of some sort, and, indeed, I
note that where I hit the surface accidentally while dremelling, it
looks visibly different (lighter and shinier). It doesn't seem to peel
like a plastic film (doesn't feel like it, either), though it did smell
a bit like a plastic while I was dremelling it.
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