Originally Posted by Ron111 Bob,
It's that's massive work area that keeps me coming back. I can just envision loading the table with multiple vises, and using the fixture offset tables in MACH 2 (or Mach 3) and sitting back for an hour or so and watching it work. But like I say, I keep coming back and reconsidering the IH.
Ron |
I agree Ron, and think that sort of stuff is very cool. I always read everything I can find on fixturing and other production work. Not sure I'll ever need to make a bunch of anything, but it's quite fascinating. I've been tempted to just leave my 4" vise and 8" rotab all set up on the mill as well. There is certainly plenty of room for that.
RE your thought of loading a bunch of vises and sitting back, I have sure seen this done in a lot of the production-related articles I've read. I've seen Kurt vises (the 4 inchers would be nice and smaller for this, I think 4 would fit on the IH table), grinding vises (even smaller and hence more parts fit), but how about these collet indexers:
That's a setup that HuFlungDung did for some sort of a job he was doing. I've done a little bit of work with collets on the mill, just with simple collet blocks in the vise, and I have to say I love them. Seems like you could really bang out some parts using a setup like Hu's. It's tempting to consider that even if your part isn't round, a round boss plus a CNC program to deal with what's above the collet might not be a bad way to go for small parts. The boss could be cut off later, and "round" indexes so nicely!
Best,
BW