In this week's Fixture Friday,
we're going to take a look at one of her customers palates that got him toe parts
per pallet and plenty of walkaway time
So this week's Fix or Friday came from Jason Asher
with E3 Manufacturing in Littleton, Colorado.
Jason has a machine shop and he purchased a few of our pallets
are ten by six pallets to use with our pro pallets.
System. So let's take a look.
Now, here's the first photo he sent me.
Over here is the pallet.
Now, notice he's got twin pallets going on here.
That's great because while one pal is being machined.
He's unloading and loading the second pallet outside of the machine.
So taking a look at this, this is before are ready to go stage
and this is what it looks like when it is done with the cycle.
Let me zoom in here and show you the configuration that Jason is using.
So in
the strip form, he's getting five parts
per raw stock and he's holding it with three different types of clamps.
The first one is these Talon grips telling grips
are double sided and they have a knife style edge.
So it gives a really aggressive hold, which is perfect for first off work.
Then he uses the classic pit bull clamp on both sides.
So having pit bull clamps on both sides of the telegraph
gives good, even holding pressure
on your part for the second operation.
He uses machine-able, unit force clamps now the unit force clamps are nice
because you can turn them into what's essentially what's essentially soft jaws.
So zooming in really tight here, you can see that
he's cut it to match the profile of his part
Now, on the pallet side, he's put it into a pocket.
And again, that pocket has a
sort of soft jaw type of look, too so the part is always being pushed up
against a large, broad surface.
And from what he told me, it's holding just great.
You zoom out, we'll take a look at the before pallet.
So over here, it's nice.
You can see that he's just setting the raw material
right on the top of the pallet, which he's face mill.
So he's got a really consistent Z height to start from.
Then he flips it over and you can't see it here, maybe peeking in over here.
But again, that profile is held with the uniform clamps.
And then he's piecemealing it and then adding all the chamfer
features that you see, kind of like the design features of these little
like fingertips, if you will, all the way around.
So overall, a really good set of palettes
OK, so here we are taking a look at the second photo.
Now, what I love that Jason did here
is he used our ten by six inch palettes
and that's great because he has a
has super minimal or maybe a minimal two, which has, if I remember
correctly, 20 inches of travel in the ex
and six inches of travel in the Y.
So by using our largest palette, he's
maximizing the machining work area and he's maximizing
essentially the number of parts he puts on the pallet.
OK. And in this third photo, this is the second set of palettes
for a very similar looking part.
Now for the first operation, you can see he used the same method here
of using the Talon grips in the middle and then the Pitbull clamps on each end.
In this, he's getting ten up one parts
and then ten up to parts, which is fantastic.
Now, the nice thing that Jason did here was he used the cut
to length uniform style of clamps.
So this is all one piece of material that expands out again.
And it's a kind of like a soft jaw approach.
And then your center
clamping thing that actually pushes out and clamps on the parts.
What I love about this is the little amount of work
Jason is actually doing to clamp a lot of parts.
So he's tightening one, two, three,
four screws to clamp on ten parts.
And second off and only four screws again
to clamp on ten parts in the first stop.
That's an incredible efficiency of motion, right there.
So let me highlight the three things that stand out to me in his set of palettes.
Number one, the efficiency of movement.
Going back to his first palette
because Jason is
unloading and loading the pallets outside of the machine
he's actually minimize the amount of work he actually has to do
to get these parts out and then back in ready to go.
In total, he is tightening down
11 clamps to get 20 parts, which is fantastic.
That's what you want to do.
In the second set of pallets, like I mentioned.
He's really minimize the amount of work he has to do
to have that much clamping efficiency.
Now the second thing is the offline part loading,
that is absolutely the right approach with palettes, work holding.
You want to minimize spindle downtime when the spindle is
not turning profit is not flowing.
So if you can do the slow part of unloading and loading parts
outside of the machine, the pallet swaps are about 20 seconds
That also frees up the operator, in this case Jason
or his employee, to go run other machines or do
other things like inspection or debugging or just taking a break.
That's the nice thing that I like about this.
And finally, taking a look at that second photo is the use of his work envelope.
If you've got a machine that can hold our large pallets, definitely do it.
The only time you want to go smaller is if
the weight of the fixture is a concern.
Now, out of the box on machines,
our ten inch by six inch pallets are £24.
So if you have lots of pockets and you have light aluminum parts,
the weight is not really going to be an issue.
Also, the mini mill here is a relatively small machine,
so leaning in isn't that big of an issue.
If you're loading something like a VF five or above or a bigger do sand mill or
something like that, you don't want to be leaning in with that much weight.
But Jason definitely used the work flow to perfection in this.
So overall, really great set of pallets.
Well done, Jason.
If you want more inspiration.
Search the hashtag Pierson fixture Friday on Instagram.
And if you have a set of fixtures that you want to share with us,
also add that fixture, even if you posted it months ago.
And if it stands out to us, we might ask to use your fixture
in an upcoming fixture Friday.
So until then, go innovate your production.