#Cutting stainless steel tubing full size

A Sharpie or a piece of tape works well to make the initial mark.

Start by dry fitting the parts as much as is possible and making a small mark where it needs to be cut. Alas, we don’t have space for every conceivable tool on board and it’s a compromise.

#Cutting stainless steel tubing full size

A full size hacksaw would also be faster than the mini one, which is better for working in confined spaces. And we don’t have a stainless tubing cutter (a worthwhile investment for a bigger project but note that you have to have a tubing cutter designed for stainless, such as this one on Amazon, and it still helps to mark the tube and begin the cut with a file as described below so that the cutter doesn’t wobble and spiral). We’ve tried using the Dremel tool to cut and found that while it would work, it would take forever. Here’s the best way we’ve found to do it, working in the cockpit with minimal tools. The squarer we could make the cuts, the more securely they’d fit into the connectors and the stronger the overall structure would be. And we were reusing one old section of tubing to make two shorter diagonal supports.

We could only get the new stainless tubing in half-foot increments, plus we wanted to dry fit it and mark exactly how long it needed to be. We’ve been working to beef up the stainless on our dinghy davits in preparation for a new, very large solar panel. If you don’t have a full shop with a vice and so on, it can be tough to make a nice clean square cut in stainless tubing.