DFM A2 Steel Dowel Plate 17 Holes MADE IN USA (English 17 Holes)

Product Information

Pick up the Fixture Plate from its crate, position is bottom side up and lay it on the machine table. My CNCCookbook business is far more important to me than any review, so I’m not afraid to be critical if need be.

Constructed from robust, 3/8" thick American-made A2 tool steel, this plate is precision-machined and ground to meet your most demanding woodworking requirements, with hardness levels ranging from 59 to 61 on the Rockwell C scale for enduring sharpness. It has to reach past the 1-2-3 blocks that will hold the plate off the table while I am machining through holes.

To make dowels, you'll need the basic tool ("Grundgerät"), one of the two drives ("Mitnehmer") we offer to produce the desired dowel size, and an adapter sleeve insert ("Einsatzhülse") of the corresponding diameter. The Veritas system is a good value if you only need a few, but the Lie-Nielsen plate is a cheaper way to go if you want them all. If you want to make exact-sized dowels from any wood you choose, a Lie-Nielsen Dowel Plate is the best tool. The plate can be mounted in a wood block, though I find centering it over a dog hole in my bench works fine. Unless you’re an exceptional machinist, you probably won’t be able to build a plate larger than your machine’s travels that is also accurate enough.

They’re protected from chips by set screws that you remove when you’re ready to use a particular hole. I will use some big cnc clamps (step clamps) that can reach under the table and set the plate on some 1-2-3 blocks so I can drill through holes. Having done the dowel pin holes for the keys, we do the large through holes for the countersunk socket head cap screws that will hold the plate down with T-Slot Nuts. Plus, the larger size means there is room for fixture related stuff to sit outside the work envelope.Following simple instructions, you set the two blades for the size you want, make a short section of dowel and then adjust the finishing blade to bring the dowel to exact size.

We can ensure the vise is installed repeatably to the same location and perfectly trammed very easily. When you keep all that in mind, the pricing on commercial fixture plates suddenly makes a lot more sense, but lets run through the exercise and understand a little about how to make one anyway. With an accurate Fixture Plate, you can machine big parts in sections, moving the part to allow access to each section.You don’t want a Fixture Plate that isn’t made to pretty exacting standards, otherwise it can’t do its job of locating things accurately and repeatably very well.

This range provides the flexibility to create custom dowels from almost any material, be it hardwoods, softwoods, or exotics. This is a problem for things like machinist’s vises, where we want the jaws to be parallel to the X-axis travel of the machine. You simply drive an oversized piece of wood through the sharp-edged hole of the solid A2 tool steel insert to shear excess material from the dowels.

The fine adjustment is required since woods of different densities have different fiber springback when cut. This is a very common scenario when putting, for example, a plate fixture, down on the Fixture Plate. For longer slab-life, superior joint stability and unrivalled joint deflection, the ACI-compliant PD3® Dowel Cradle features a sleeveless plate dowel designed to reduce joint spalling, facilitate optimal load transfer and deliver the lowest risk of restraint compared to other market-leading products. Second is the accuracy is not that easy to attain, particularly for a plate that will be larger than the travels of your machine.