It's time for another.
Pierson Workholding Fixture Friday, and in today's episode
we have a fairly simple pallet but with a really cost effective approach.
Let's head in the office and take a look.
So in today's Fixture
Friday we are taking a look at a pair of pallets
from Jacob Rhodes from TrueTracSaw.com.
That's true trac saw dot com.
He was kind enough to share one of his fixtures with us that piques my attention.
And he sent us a bunch of photos.
So let's take a look.
So the first thing that I notice here is it's a 10 by 12 pallet.
Obviously, this is holding multiple parts that's why our pallet system exists
is for high density, multi-part work holding.
But this pallet is unique.
Before I show you those
aspects, Let's step through some photos and show you what I'm talking about.
So here is the pallet and it has pitbull clamps set up.
And what I like about this is Jacob has used
pitbull clamps facing one direction,
and then he's sharing a pocket
and he is using Pitbull clamps facing the other way.
So what that does is it falls in line with some of our guidelines
of not using a slot, but instead putting your clamps in pockets.
And because his clamps are right next to each other, he's not losing
a lot of real estate on the pallet by keeping those in a pocket
that's either close or identical to each other lined up.
These are offset just a little bit, which is fine.
It worked out for his fixer
Here's another shot here.
It gives you a little bit better angle.
So it has two clamps facing one direction.
The other is the other way.
And then you start to see what's going on here.
He's got some pockets, but no clamps.
And it will hit that a minute.
There's his work pieces in place.
Also, one of the thing, if we back up here, you'll
notice that he's got about I'm going to say that's
about three eighths of an inch of material along these edges.
That's perfect. I get that question a lot.
How much material is enough material to make a secure hold
and I won't deform the pallet?
Well, if you are clamping with our
using our pallet system with a half inch wide clamps,
these are the three quarter inch wide pit bull clamps,
at least half of the width of the clamp That three eighths.
So if this is 750 three eighths wide of material
along the edge of the pallet is fine.
If you're using half inch, quarter inch is fine.
So what he's done here, plenty of material to support that.
So you can see here he's got enough spacing
apparently for his cutters to go around.
I don't want to show his final product, but I can just tell you
that it's faced out here and he doesn't need to squeeze a cutter in between here.
He planned it out just right.
And there's enough clearance on the sides to get his cutter where he needs them.
Now, what has he done that's unique?
It's obvious here.
So in the previous fixture, his clamps
were going vertical from our viewpoint.
Now they're in a horizontal configuration.
Why would he do that?
Well,
this is why he has two different sized parts.
Now, this is incredibly efficient because not only
is he using one pallet to hold eight parts,
but he's also configured this pallet for a dual function.
So he's holding eight parts of a different bar stocked with.
And not only are they different colors, but they're slightly different sizes.
So I could easily when I first saw these photos,
I could see that there was an easy differentiation,
which was made very apparent in this.
So you notice that these two pockets Let me actually zoom in here
These pockets
here, you can see that they intersect each other in this area,
whereas these pockets here, there's some material in between.
So he's done it right.
He's left plenty of clearance around these clamps.
So his back side of his clamp has 100% contact with the back side of the pallet.
And he's just space these out for exactly
the right size part that he's cutting here.
So, again, really innovative and really good.
Another shot, just a beautiful pallet.
You could tell he's using modern a strategy of stepping out that
that tool path.
So you can see that nice, cool spiral look.
Totally. Well done.
Really innovative use of not just creating a pallet, but making it versatile.
There are three things that stand out to me.
Number one,
he is you've heard like reduce reuse, recycle
what he is reusing these pallets, not because they've reached
the end of their life, but because he wants to give them more life.
So he is cutting down on his inventory so he doesn't need to carry
as many of our pallets
if he's making his own, he doesn't need to make more using our hardware kits.
He is cutting down that lean principle, reducing inventory.
He's cutting down inventory by reusing these.
Number two, the pitbull clamps in pockets.
That is such a great use of it because most of the time you will take
pitbull clamps and you will stagger them like row row, row.
And in between there's going to be a rail.
And if you can just reverse some of those like he's done here, where they're facing
opposite ways you are reducing the amount of material
between the clamps that you
that you would normally take out just to put in an extra backstop
More details on a future fixture Friday on that.
And finally,
he is using to palettes now I only showed you one,
but there's an identical pallet that when this is being machined inside
of the machine, the identical pallet is outside of the machine.
And you're doing the slow, cumbersome work of taking the parts
in and out and reloading it that way.
Spindle downtime is seconds 20, 30 seconds at the most.
And you keep that spindle turning.
So if you like this pallet, shout out to Jacob.
Thanks for doing that. Job well done.
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So until next time go innovate Your production.