- Now, if you look at this part closely,
it would require five setups
using traditional vise workholding.
But in this week's Fixture Friday,
I'm gonna show you how
we palletized the second operation
to get eight parts per cycle
without using a single clamp.
Let's get started.
♪ I was made for this ♪
(rock music)
- So if you're subscribed to this channel,
you may have caught one of our videos from last year,
in which we featured our five axis UMC mill.
In that video, we used our pro pallet base,
made a sweet looking palette,
and we mounted our row device to that palette.
It's Pierson from top to bottom.
So then we held four parts at a time,
and this is the part.
It's the hand valve that we make
for our pallet systems,
both our pro and mini series.
Now, the beauty of five axis workholding,
is that you can access multiple faces of a part
and reduce setups.
But the downside of five axis machining
is that you typically can only work
on just a few parts at a time,
because they can interfere with each other
when it comes to tool clearances.
So by us using our row device,
we could access four faces of this part,
and then for parts per cycle.
It's essentially a 16X boost
over the old school approach
of one part, in one vise,
in one machine at a time.
Now, let's take a close look at this part.
Now, one nice thing about this approach
is not just that we took care
of four operations with our row device,
but the fact that there are no clamping parts
anywhere on the entire part.
Now, sometimes when you clamp too tightly
using a regular vise,
you'll get witness lines
if your vise jaw has a burr on it,
or if you miss clearing a chip,
even just clamping too tightly,
you can sometimes imprint a texture
on the face of the part that's undesirable.
So to avoid some of these things,
we've designed this palette to use
what I call the knife makers approach,
so that we're bolting through the palette
and holding these parts individually.
But there's something unique about this.
Let's take a look at the bottom side to explain.
(rock music)
Now, the bottom side looks like
our standard pallet configuration,
with our two locking rings,
which the bearings expand into
and pull down with thousands of pounds of force.
We have our two bushings,
which locate on the round
and diamond pins of the base.
But now you have this single bolt.
Now, because I'm the designer of this part,
I can design in any thread and features
and use any tooling that I like.
So that's what makes this part
a little bit unique.
Design freedom, essentially.
And so for those of you out there
that are maybe knife makers,
where the inside of the blade handles
are not typically seen,
this approach of adding locating features
is often perfect for you.
So again, looking at the bottom of the part,
we have these two holes,
which we designed in.
Now, they serve no other purpose
other than to locate on two dowel pins
on the top side of the pallet.
Now, we've turned these custom threaded screws
that go in from the bottom of the pallet
and into the, arguably, non-traditional thread.
It's actually 875 diameter
with 20 threads per inch,
so that makes it seven eighths 20 to be exact.
Now, because this is a pretty beefy thread,
we can take some aggressive cuts.
In fact, we are using
a three quarter inch end mill,
100% axial engagement,
and 20% radial,
which works out to 150,000th stepover.
Now, the nice thing about this
pinned bolt-through method,
is that it's not subject to over
or under clamping forces,
which can often throw off the accuracy
of your second op parts
if they're clamped too tightly in a vise.
Actually, you can test this
by setting up an indicator
against the fixed jaw of a single station vise
and clamping down on a part.
And I want you to really clamp down on that.
You'll actually see that the indicator moves.
Now, if the indicator moves,
that means the jaw is moving.
If the jaw moves, so does a part,
and that's why you can get mismatches in op two,
even though the first article
may have been perfect.
It's really reliant on consistent
operator pressure on the vise handle.
Now, on a side note,
that's why our pallet systems
are really accurate,
because it's the air valve
removing pressure from the base
that causes the pallet to be locked down
with a consistent spring-powered clamping force.
So it's isolated from varying physical inputs
of the operator.
Now, radius edges can be problematic,
and anyone working with these
knows that both the axial
and radial engagement
of the corner rounding end mill
has to be perfect
or else you're gonna have edges
that just don't look right.
Or, worst case scenario,
you'll leave a step in the edge of your part.
Now, this palate completely
eliminates that from happening.
Now, let's look at some performance gains.
So when these parts came off
of our five-axis machine,
we would hold them, four at a time,
in a double vise,
as a prototyping setup
to prove out the part design.
So, two parts per jaw opening.
Now, this was fine, but again,
clamping in a vise was exposing us
to potential operator errors.
So, not only did this pallet
give us higher quality parts,
we doubled the output of our prototype setup
with eight per pallet, per cycle.
This means, half the number of tool changes
per eight parts produced,
and double the unattended runtime.
Now, keep in mind that
the beauty of our pallet systems
is that while one pallet is being machined,
the second identical pallet
is outside of the machine.
So we're taking the slow portion
of loading and unloading the machine
almost completely out of the equation.
Changing a pallet of eight parts
only takes about 20 seconds.
Now, this change over time
works out to two and a half seconds per part.
Now, think about that.
Two and a half second part changes
over using a traditional method.
That means opening the vise,
taking out the part, cleaning the jaws,
putting the next part in accurately
and closing it with consistent pressure,
and do all of this in two and a half seconds.
Now, I don't know any operator
that could compete with that
type of speed consistently.
And if you know of one,
give them a shout out in the comments
and we'll get them a raise for sure.
Hey, do you know someone who could benefit
from this approach to machining?
Hit the share button below and send them a link,
and if you're benefiting from this content,
consider subscribing
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so you don't miss the next Fixture Friday.
So until next time, go innovate your production.
(rock music)