Feasible to drill and tap holes on router before laser cutter?

How do you drill and tap holes in laser cut parts?

We take the flat parts off our Trumpf Trulaser 3030 and use a drill press to drill and tap the pilot holes produced by the laser.

I was considering getting a big router like the Haas GR-510 and put the 0.125 in thick x 4 x 8 ft steel sheet on the router and drill and tap holes there, and add a fiducial in two of the corners. Then load the sheet in the laser cutter, use the Detectline feature to detect the fiducial holes and zero the coordinate system and laser cut the part profile.

The advantage is eliminating the material handling of singulated parts for the drill tap operation since this approach does it in the large sheet.

Has anyone done this with a Trumpf and how feasible is the idea?

How accurately will the Trumpf Detectline feature allow you to register the part location so that you can then cut another feature on the part?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Doug

For a little more detail, the parts we tap are in the 0.25 to 0.5" thick range with 1/4, 3/8 and 1/2" threaded holes. We also frequently counter sink or counter bore holes in these steel sheets. We do cut lots of 1/16 and 1/8 thick sheet but rarely tap them.

I guess I could try using mechanical stops to locate from the edge of the sheet, but our Trumpf uses a camera to locate the sheet now so I forgot about using mechanical stops.