New tool / Solution to a problem I have seen

This past week I have seen three separate individuals attempt to place two parts in the Bridgeport vice at the same time, in an attempt to have ‘identical’ parts. This is a problem, not so much for the machine, but for your part. Even if you have two ‘identical’ blocks of material; they are likely different in dimensions by at least 1-3/10,000. A small enough difference that you can’t really ‘feel’ it or see it, but enough that one of those pieces is going to be looser in the vice then you would like. Perhaps loose enough that it will move while you attempt to mill it.

I went ahead and purchased a milling stop, that you can use to precisely position (repeatedly) your part in the mill vice, thereby allowing you to hold one part at a time, but still obtain an ‘identical’ size. It is straight forward to use as you can use in the image below. I have placed the tool on the workbench behind the milling machine.

It clamps to the bed of the mill using a t-nut and associated hardware. Then you use an allen wrench to adjust the vertical and horizontal position of the stop onto your first piece. After that you can swap out work pieces and they will all be in the same position in the vice every time.

Enjoy!

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We could use something like that in the laser cutter…

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Well I would use two neodymium rectangular magnets placed at right angles on the bed of the laser cutter to provide a fixed registration point for swapping out multiple pieces.

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