A fixture plate and a couple of mod vises from Saunders Machine Works would make the parts that I need to produce on the Tormach infinitely easier to handle. I’m happy to buy the gear and host it at the shop indefinitely unless there are any objections. The fixture plate would be a fairly permanent install on the table once it gets trammed in but there shouldn’t be any reason folks wanting to use a regular vise on it can’t continue their workflows unimpeded.
Could you post a pic of the setup for everyone to get a sense of proportions.
Roughly, this. The plates are about the size of the table, and are precision ground with 1/2-13 holes in them. They’re designed to work with the vises shown which for most things are much nicer than a standard vise, as you can move and adjust with no tramming or parallels. Our existing vises will bolt up to this just fine as well.
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I’m in favor of this. For people who do repeated precision work. Jig plates are the way. The powers that be will have to clear this. I have no authority.
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I think this would be great. Strongly support.
Is there anything a vise can do that these can’t? This looks a lot nicer than a vise and certainly easier to shove around. It looks like they have more clearance than a vise, too.
One issue would be that a mishap now does damage to a really expensive plate.
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If you need to make soft jaws you most likely want to use a real vise as you need to get soft jaw blanks from the vise manufacturer for these, and you can’t really make tall/complicated soft jaws. Other than that these are generally superior. As far as mistakes go, I would say it’s no worse than cutting into the table of the machine, which is pretty hard to do (unlike on the routers where it’s a rite of passage)
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No objections from me. I have some parts that I use custom soft jaws on, but as long as the bolt holes are compatible with our vise, then this is a lot more flexible for most things.
It looks like this particular plate is bolt holes only. Do they have any similar options with dowel pin holes as well? Repeated fixturing with dowel pins would be another big convenience of having a fixture plate.
We’d want to do some TLC on the machine table before we put the fixture plate on.
The plate is actually counterbored for dowel pins too, every hole is bored smooth at 1/2" for the first 1/4" of depth before the threads start.
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Hey, Josh.
I think it has a lot of potential. I was wanting to do some research to see what other options exist that are compatible with this system. Please post links and part numbers for everything you are suggesting.
https://saundersmachineworks.com all the stuff is from here. Lots of YouTube videos on setups and work holding with these.
Based on feedback here, I went ahead and ordered this. I want to use it for my projects and it seems like others do as well.
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From a logistics perspective, it’d be preferable for stuff like this (machine accessories) to be donated or purchased by Asmbly rather than hosted If you’d be willing to consider a donation, feel free to ask other users to chip in. Asmbly might consider a partial donation (i.e. Asmbly covers part of the purchase cost.)
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