Thursday, June 21, 2012

Vise Clamps

I got sick using kludgey clamping jobs to hold the 2" vise to my CNC's table. I came up with a clamp concept a while ago, but I never got around to making a set until a few days ago when I found the right sized stock in my material pile. I was too lazy to find the drawings I had made of the clamps so I went by memory on the shape and I made up the dimensions as I went. I also decided to play around with running my spindle at 20,000 RPM. Both the parts and my test cuts turned out great. I was able to cut the parts at more than 5 times my usual material removal rate!


 I used 4 blocks to hold my vise down. This vise is one of my favorite finds. It has incredible specs for parallelism because every face is precision ground, and it practically cost nothing. The only downside is it's a pain to clamp parts with the screw.


The clamps are made from .5" square stock aluminum. They are 0.01" shorter than the surface of the vise they clamp onto. This ensures they actually clamp down. I bolted down the vise in less than 30 seconds with these new clamps. Another added benefit of these is if I decided to add a second vise they won't create a large gap between the additional vise. GENIUS!

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