Good morning folks,
I am hoping to get some advice for how to hold a workpiece in the HAAS i’ve been trying to manufacture efficiently. I can’t really afford a machine of my own so I somewhat rely on the HAAS for making small runs of these enclosures. I bring all my own tooling and i’ve gotten pretty efficient at setup/teardown of my project to help save time. My parts take 4 operations for 2 different parts and 1 operation for one of the parts. So essentially it’s 2 setups that are somewhat different. I was initially thinking of using a Pierson Workholding vacuum table with the replaceable plates for swapping setups quickly, but the idea of having to hookup an air line and all that seems like it’s not really helping me out since I need to take it out every time I’m done. The other approach I thought about was some soft jaws in the vice, but the only issue I have with this is that I can’t run more than 1 part at a time (I was hoping to be able to run at least 2 at a time to make it faster. I can cut the time per part down in half by running them in one setup). The third option I was looking into was a mitee bite soft jaw mounted to the fixture plate to allow for multiple parts at a time without any kind of vacuum system needed. Eventually I’ll have to get my own machine but until then I need a flexible workholding solution that will save me some time. Currently it takes me about all of one day to machine these. Also I can’t use tabs on the plates because I have to chamfer each one and the chamfer operation cuts through the tabs.