810% Walk-Away Boost! | Fixture Friday 24

If you want to avoid the boredom of feeding a cnc kurt vise for hours on end, you're going to love this week's Pierson Workholding Fixture Friday. I'll show you a High Density Workholding palletized fixture approach that allowed my machinist to walk away from our Haas VF2 CNC Mill for an HOUR while simultaneously producing more parts!
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**Videos We Recommend**

Fixture Friday Series:
THIS is the playlist to watch if you want to learn about designing fixtures.

0:00 Intro: The pain
1:28 The part
2:00 The Old Ways
2:19 Op2 Fixtures
2:51 The clamps and fixture rails
4:23 Why round stock?
4:45 Key Tips!
7:22 The Stats

#cncmachining #piersonworkholding #titansofcnc #workholding

[tylergilbertson]

I am pretty sure that this channel is the only one on YouTube that I have watched EVERY single video because there is always so much great info and inspiration for the shop.

[BalticBlades]

I highly recommend the podcast, been listening it from first episode, and i really makes my Mondays!

[brianwaayenberg]

. Those clamps put a lot of horizontal load and can move the horizontal x/y location around quite a bit.
My recommendation to buyers is don’t be cheap and get the smallest/thinnest pallet you can. Yes it’s cheaper and lighter. But an extra bit of meat goes a long way.
My first pallet experience I wish I had had an extra 0.5 or more heck 2”more width to resist the force of these clamps. Placing a part 1” sunk in and 1” above the pallet for op2 I could yaw the part rotationally with low clamping force as the pallet wall bowed. Keep it in mind! (My design fault, not a Pierson fault, their mini pallet product worked flawlessly! ) I left 0.5” of wall as a support and it was not nearly enough. Leave some meat, you can always remove it later if the pallet is to heavy!
Thanks again for the vids/great products Jhon!

[wiserprecision]

Jay, Glad to see you putting out videos again! One topic that would be great to get your perspective on is the offline management of chips/coolant in your shop. Specifically relating to cleanliness of working with offline pallets. We are trying to think of clever ways to keep our pallet unload/load process as quick and clean as possible. We have some ideas, and are already using chip fans in the machines, but would love to hear from you on this as well.

[tonerduckpin]

John spent 67 minutes watching YouTube videos while the part was running.

[TrPrecisionMachining]

good video Mr, Pierson,,thanks for your time

[ericevans]

Can you explain how that is actually a better way to make these than on your lathe?

With the lathe you get unattended runtime of (however many parts fit into a bar) * (how many bars are loaded in the feeder). I would guess that adds up to a lot more than fit on the fixture. You are also not spending 5-10 minutes of manual labor loading/unloading parts, not to mention the strain on operators of handling loaded pallets.
The biggest benefit for quality would be making a complete part every cycle. You would be able to observe and mitigate issues such as wear or broken tools before they cause parts to go out of spec. In the case of the pallet you have the potential to end up with a fully loaded pallet of bad parts PLUS a lost hour of runtime.

Obviously some nuances in how the lathe runs, and maybe its not profitable to run those ¢ types of parts on that kind of $$$ machine

[richhuntsd]

Nice to see you again Jay. I always like it when you young Bucks come up with great ideas. Well done video. Give John a big “pat on the back”. How do We access this new platform?

[AnthonyGriz]

That's definitely a pleasant improvement to useful productivity!

[powermoveengineering]

Jay, I am curious what your approach is when you are trying to sell your own product through your own website but are regularly contacted by distributors that are asking for supplier info such as W9, accounting and customer service contacts, etc. To me, this seems like unnecessary hoops to jump through for a simple online retail sale. But have you found success pursuing the distributor route for your products? I would like to avoid using them but at the same time, a sale is a sale? Thanks for any feedback. Really appreciate these videos!

[Southernchassisworks]

as always look forward to your clips, just a small growing business here trying to evolve cheers guys

[phillhuddleston]

You can't just figure cycle time you also have to factor in unloading and loading the parts either in the machine vise or on a pallet. My guess is the pallet system is overall faster per part making it even a better outcome.

[JohnChvatalGSTV]

Please make the podcast available on YouTube.

[zacharywampler]

Do you recommend steel threaded inserts in the pallet to improve thread life for the clamps? Or do you screw the Mitee Bites directly to the aluminum pallet?

[elijahcbr]

Awsome pallet. Do you have any videos on how to model a pallets in fusion? I've been wanting to get your products but modeling has been holding me back. Thanks for all good vids.

[DErMinecrafter]

Nice fixture there!

Idea for the "knive makers method" in the second op:
Why don't you make a second op fixture plate similar to your current one, but with the exact same part positions as on the first op.
Then you could leave your OP10 parts clamped while you put the empty second op fixture on top. Then screw all the parts in from the top into the finished threads without having to hold the plate and fiddling around the workpiece and screws from two sides. Since the position of the parts is still given by the OP10 fixture this should be a lot easier.

Calling it the "contact grill method" :D

[cyber]

i think you can get the exanding clamps same size but longer so you'd get more surface area but no row losses

[bryansmith]

I guess my biggest question, is why are you making this from round stock? If you used flat bar, cut to length with some excess, this would be a 2 operation mill part. Maybe I'm not seeing a feature but it looks like something that you could run from square stock...

[Thepriest]

What about making a pallet out of 7075 Aluminum? Would that reduce flex? Another big item that you didn’t mention in your machining times was how long did it take to load two round bars in your vice per op vs loading a single pallet. Quite a bit of time savings there also. Being able to walk away from the machine for a good amount of time is valuable. I hate 3 to 8 min short cycle times on my 4th axis. Can’t walk away and do anything and keep the machine running.

[TimothyFrancisco]

Most of our parts are round, so always interested in different ways to hold round parts. How does this compare to the SMX output? Considering getting a Doosan MX for it's versatility.