Easy Low Profile Side Clamps For The Milling Machine

hey and welcome back i have an upcoming project on the channel and i'll need to machine the part directly on the mill table and to be able to do that i need to be able to clamp the work piece down to the table and not have it fly off now the most common way of doing that would be to use a clamp of some type in conjunction with the t-slots and this method works fine but the most obvious drawback is using this method you can't machine the entire top surface at once so as you machine the part you will need to play musical chairs with the clamps and move them around so you can machine the part a great alternative would be to use a toe clamp of some type but if you want to make it yourself there is a fair amount of machining involved such as machining a captive grub screw in some of the designs and that really is a lot more than i'd personally want to do especially for something as simple as a table clamp the big advantage to toe clamps though is that it produces a downwards clamping force as well as a sideways clamping force this in theory should help stop the part from moving upwards and lifting off the table now the design i came up with should work in a similar fashion to other toe clamps but it should be a lot easier to make in the home workshop i'm a bit limited on stock this week but a piece of 50 by 20 steel bar should work just fine for the jaws and i also have a piece of scrap metal which i'll machine up to serve as a very basic angle plate the first thing i machine up is the angle block the angle that i'm going for is not hugely critical but i'm going for something roughly in the region of 10 degrees [Music] with the angle block now made up i can now face and then clean up the other two parts before machining the final face i'll place the stock on the angle blocks to tilt it in the vise and hold it at that eleven and a half degree angle so [Music] and these are the two parts done i machined the other half off camera just to fit this one it really isn't anything too difficult the second set of dovetails are about 0.2 millimeters bigger to allow for a really nice sliding action the final thing left to do is drill and counter bore a hole for a socket head cap screw [Music] and that is the part done so let's go clamp something down and see if it works i'll be using the two clamps as a sort of fixture to clamp up against they're a little bit tall for this work piece but it's only a test next i'll slide in two t-nuts the back jaw is clamped in first and i'll make sure that the moving jaw is a few millimeters off the table next the moving jaw is screwed down and as the cap screw tightens the jaw moves forwards and downwards applying a force in both directions and even though i'm only using one clamp it does a fantastic job at keeping the work piece in place it is a bit tall to be used on this work i did design it to be used on a much bigger workpiece but if i needed to i could shave five or ten millimeters off the height of this and it would still work just fine also because these are unhardened they will pick up a bit of wear as you use them personally i don't think it's necessary but if you really wanted to you could harden them if you wanted to as a final note i will leave a link to a very basic e-drawing of the part if the size doesn't suit your setup or tooling feel free to change it but it should be a very good starting point for you to base your design off and that's about it for now i hope you enjoyed this video thank you very much for watching see you next time

Channel: Artisan Makes

Views: 421,767

Keywords: milling machine clamps, toe clamps, table clamps, milling machine table clamps, milling amchine toe clampos, milling machine vise, milling machine clamp design, making milling machine clamps, make milling machine table clamps, how to hold part to milling machine table

Id: Dw27hDPZ-6E

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 21 2022