Friday, August 30, 2013

Vise Support

When milling with the machine, I had trouble getting the endmills to reach the piece being cut.  On an actual mill, the whole table would be able to move up and down, but since I don't have that luxury, the range is limited.  My solution was to build a riser for the vise to raise the workpiece to optimum height.  I started with a piece of 3" square tube with .25" wall thickness,  No sense in making it solid.
I milled off the end so it won't overhang from the milling table.  It's inconvenient to have a machine like this yet not even have a saw to cut pieces to size, so my choices are 30 minutes of hacksawing or less time milling.
A little more metal is wasted, a small price to pay.

The first thing I did was flycut the top to make it flat.  As you can see from the picture, the surfaces of the tube are slightly dipped in the middle.
I did this only on the top and the bottom.
Here the holes to mount the vise are being center drilled.  I did the drilling out of order.
Then, the table mounting holes were drilled.  Then it was bolted down and the vise mounting holes were drilled completely...
...and then tapped with 1/2"-20 threads, 1/2"-13 could've worked as well
The support works fine, however when cutting in the X direction, the whole setup is a bit unstable due to the amount it protrudes from the table.  This could've been reduced if I had a wider piece of tubing to build from, but this works good enough.

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