Workholding

Suppose your boss enjoys cooking shows. One day he hands you his design sketch for the latest and greatest pie tin. “Here, make me a prototype,” he says. “I'm entering a pastry contest.” How do you machine this?

Vise jaws that grip as little as 2mm of workpiece material without special tooling or machining a gripping feature.

I once thought nothing of boring a new set of top jaws. Just remove half a dozen cap screws, take the old jaws out, bolt on fresh jaws, attach a spider or boring ring and crank the hand wheel until the part fits. Setups were long in the 1980s and my boss considered 2 or 3 hours of downtime each day a normal cost of business.

The benefits of high-density workholding.

The Workholding column in the April 2013 issue of Cutting Tool Engineering magazine shares the story of a shop facing a machining requirement for finishing small die-cast aluminum engine covers.

A collection of workholding products compiled by the editors of Cutting Tool Engineering magazine.

Tim St. Martin knew there had to be a better way of fixturing parts on his company's 5-axis machine tools. “We'd visited some of our suppliers and saw how they were holding parts on their 5-axis machines,” said the senior manager of manufacturing engineering for Carlsbad, Calif.-based orthopedic implant manufacturer Alphatec Spine Inc. “They were mounting the blanks into a 'picture frame' and then screwing that frame to a tombstone-mounted fixture. This basically limited access to one side of the workpiece per operation. Many in our company thought we should hold them the same way.”