Mill Vise Fixture Plate

I was inspired by this article on Tom Liptons OxTool blog to make a clamping plate for my mill vise. As Tom points out, this is a great way to hold on to those odd parts that won't really work in the vise but would be easy to hold in the T-Slots, if you just didn't need to take off that darn vise...

Fixture shown clamping a thin part
 

Fixture used as an Angle Plate

Base Plate Hole Pattern

Clamp Finger Drawing

I drew out these sketches in Qcad Professional, a fairly low priced 2-D cad system. If you just want to try it out, there is a community edition that lacks a few of the Pro features (primarily support for DWG and later DXF variants and polyline support). It runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD.

 The base started out a a 2" thick piece of Mic-6 remnant from Escondido Metal Supply. After squaring it up and milling to size, I added a pattern of M5 holes on 30mm centers. (I am a bit of a metric nut :) ) One thing I learned during this project is that 2" deep #19 holes are a PAIN in the keester. If I ever make another plate, I think I will drill a set of M6 holes ~ 1" deep from the other side. That way, I still get through bores for tapping, but I will only need to go down 1" with the M5's. Plus, I'd get a "Heavy Duty" side with bigger screws. (The inch equvalent would be 10-32 holes in the top and 1/4-24 on the bottom)

Finished Hole Pattern (only 50 Holes)

Side View (showing plate Thickness :) )

One advantage of the 2" material is that is sticks up above my vise without needing any parallels.

The Next Step was to make some clamp fingers. I started with 50mm long pieces of 5/8" square hot rolled stock. I took it down to a finished size of 10 mm X 15 mm and added a 30 degree chamfer for extra clearance.

Clamp fingers squared up with chamfers

To cut the chamfers, I made a simple angle plate out of some plywood. I added a stop pin on the angled face to register the blocks during the cut. This way, I could use the Z scale on the quill to get repeatable setups. I didn't check the exact angle on this block, but I made a 10 degree angle block out of lexan earlier and it indicated in at less than 0.1 degrees of error. I actually quite impressed with the accuracy of my old DeWalt miter saw :) .

Woodn angle fixture

Angle Fixture in vise (note the parallel attached to the back jaw to locate the fixture in X)

The last step was to add an M5 hole in the back for a leveling screw and to cut a 20mm long X 6mm wide slot down the center. I again used the parallel screwed to the back jaw as an X stop. I think one of my next projects will be a better x stop, but this setup works for now.

Final setup and finished fingers