Work holding - Spin Indexer

I often like to ask questions I presume to be obvious to most yet somehow they aren’t so obvious to me.

Spin Indexers and holding/clamping…

Every spin indexer i’ve ever seen online, including the one I have (below), has at most 2 machined edges (front/back) and no clamping slots/holes.

As you can see from my pics, holding on the machined edges is not possible because of the front disc and port access to the turning handle and holding side to side on unmachined surfaces will not only not be square, it will crush the powder coat finish.

So what am I missing? Is the owner expected to machine the surfaces or cut slots to meet their own needs? I just don’t see why only 2 sides are machined and not all.

Maybe they were clamping straight to the bed with the T-Slots and hold-down clamps? Then you’d only care about the bottom surface being machined. You might find that the shiny surfaces aren’t even true and are just an artifact of the manufacturing order of operations.

yes, I actually intended to include that use case as well but any clamping like that is also going to instantly ruin the powder coated top surface which is fine but just seems odd.

The original use of the spin indexer was on surface grinders. They are now the poor mans dividing head. There are cheap versions that I would consider machining slots into. The $1000 one I would fixture properly.

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+1 on cut your own slots and/or clamp it down. here’s a video on using it:
Using the spin indexer

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This may say more than anything. Thanks Charlie.

Thanks Nick. I’ve watched him before but not that video.