Making and using a fixture plate

[awetmore]

I see many threads on this forum on getting started with the CNC Taig, but less on the types of things that one needs to learn once they have a working machine. I'm at that stage now and thought I'd share something that I figured out this weekend.

I had to make 24 identical parts, and know that I'll be making more of them in the future.

I'd been planning to buy a second and maybe a third vise to allow me to make multiple parts in one run when I saw this video from NYCCNC:
[nomedia="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAx_xMiL0Ig"]YouTube - Ch18 - Tormach PCNC - Milling with a Custom Fixture[/nomedia]

It reminded me that I also had Mitee-Bite type clamps and could use those to make a something similar. My plate looks like this:


It is faster to install the two parts than using two vises with parallels, and didn't cost more than few dollars worth of scrap aluminum to make.

The two parts are exactly 4" away from each other. CamBam has a nice but hidden feature to make what they call Nested Parts. This let me draw the part and describe the operations once, then tell it to do another one 4 inches to the right.

I'm going to order some free machining steel to make the next one. I'll also relieve the center for chips and coolant flow, sort of like built in parallels.

Hope someone finds this useful.

Left machined, right in progress:


Rough cutting two pieces at once:


NYCCNC has some useful videos if you haven't found them yet. He started with a Taig, but is now running a Tormach 1100 and doing small scale custom machining.

alex

[Fastest1]

Nice work, are you fliping the part too?

[awetmore]

Nice work, are you fliping the part too?

Not for this part. It would be easy to make a plate with some locating pins if I were flipping the part, but I don't have many parts which require flipping. One that does doesn't require specific locating and the second operation is done with a 1/2" ball end mill. That is too big to run on the Taig, so I do that operation on my manual mill.