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

£32.305£64.61Clearance
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ZTS2023
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About this deal

Let’s start out looking at material costs. Given the issues make a plate larger than my machine’s travels, I will be looking at dimensions of 34 x 12 x 3/4″. I will shoot for 4140 Pre-Hardened plate as well.

Soon you’ll wonder why you wasting so much time setting things manually! Fixture Plate Review: Tosa Tool Fixture Plate I saved the best for last. Fixture Plates are just the starting point for true Modular Fixturing solutions. Tosa Tool has an extensive line of accessories that cover virtually any need. At his price points, that is unusual to see, but it is the norm for much more expensive high-end solutions. It’s great to be able to add more capability through these accessories which are also very reasonably priced. For more on machining big parts see this article: [ Tips for Parts That are Too Big for Your CNC Machine ] Fixture Plate G-Code Programming Aluminum Fixture Plates are available from some other vendors, and they are considerably cheaper. So why use steel? There are a number of reasons:You have to consider two things. First is the cost of the material is significant. Second is the accuracy is not that easy to attain, particularly for a plate that will be larger than the travels of your machine. 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. Let’s go a little more in-depth with a particular feature plate. I received a plate from Dan Bye of Tosa Tool for review purposes and installed it on my Tormach PCNC 1100 CNC Mill. Yes, journalists get free product a lot of time, but I’ll tell you the straight 411 about a product anyway. My CNCCookbook business is far more important to me than any review, so I’m not afraid to be critical if need be. We can bolt fixtures onto the mill table just fine with T-Slots. So why use a fixture plate at all?

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 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. In fact, operators spend time aligning vises with that travel, a process called tramming the vise. But with a fixture plate, the vise can be accurately installed and square, so you skip the tramming step. More time saved! Fixture Plates will save you time, but they have a couple other advantages too. They present a clean path for coolant and chips to escape. They also help protect your machine’s table from crashes, dings, and other damage.Here’s another advantage of Fixture Plates–they make machining parts that are too big for your machine’s travel easier.

Vibration is always an issue with machine tools, and aluminum has a much lower damping capacity than steel. Once clamped in place, the dowel pin holes are drilled undersized them reamed to size. Their position is not super-critical, but we should still spot drill and use screw machine-length twist drills. In an example below, I set up a vise on the Fixture Plate and it is properly trammed with no further effort. That means the three locator pins have to be positioned relative to one another with sufficient tolerance for that to happen. I have a number of the accessories, and more are coming along soon. I’ll be adding either to this article or in separate articles to talk about them over time. Example: Set Up a Vise on a Fixture Plate Installing the Tosa Tool Fixture plate took a grand total of about 20 minutes. Making sure it was set up correctly was easy to do using their key system.

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The Thermal Expansion of aluminum is also higher than for steel. We’re looking to Fixture Plates for accuracy and repeatability, but if temperatures change much, aluminum will make that a problem. Especially when we consider the large size of a Fixture Plate, which can magnify the issue. The precision doesn’t affect most of the functions of a Fixture Plate at first glance. After all, the fact a hole is off its theoretical ideal position by 0.001″ doesn’t affect repeatability or most other factors. What it does affect is how easily we can use more than one hole to locate and orient whatever we’re positioning on the Fixture Plate. Now, having made sure the Fixture Plate is in the right place, you can see where the T-Slot Nuts are. Use a tool such as a drift to reach through the Fixture Plate holes and align the T-Slot Nuts with the proper holes. Install 2 T-Slot Nuts in the top and bottom T-Slots on the left. Position them at the end of the T-Slot. It still fits fine in the PCNC 1100 enclosure. Plus, the larger size means there is room for fixture related stuff to sit outside the work envelope. That can be important when trying to use the full envelope:

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