Making a BIG Set of V Blocks for the Milling Machine | Vise Jaws

hey welcome back this week we're going to attempt to do something a little bit ambitiously lazy we're going to do two projects for the same effort of one in the previous video I finished up making a two-piece Vise for the milling machine and it's a great piece of Kit it allows you to clamp Parts almost as long as the nil table and it allows me to machine the entire top surface of the part without the need to move around any clamps however as it is at the moment I could only hold Parts with a straight edge which is fine I'm listening to machine any large pieces of round bar which thankfully I never do so what I have here is a large piece of aluminum round bar which I need to machine next week it's roughly 200 mils in diameter by 50 mils thick and I need a way to hold it down to the mill table while still having access to the top surface my aim is to face it in one or two passes and I don't really want to be moving around any clamps now the normal milvice is a little bit too small for this job so this leaves me with the two-piece Vise however I will need to make a custom set of V hard drawers in order to accommodate this large stock something similar to this but whilst I was designing it I couldn't help but notice how similar these were to a set of big V blocks very similar to a set that Curtis made at Cutting Edge engineering and given that I have no way to currently hold down large round stock on the milling machine and the possibility that I may need to machine a spindle sometime in the future I thought it would make a lot of sense to combine these two parts into one effectively I'll be making some V Jaws and V blocks that sort of act as both so what I have here is a chunk of Steel left over from Machining device and there should be enough material left in this to squeeze out two v-blocks now I do plan to heat treat and case harden these sometime in the future in order to give them a little bit of protection so before I do any Machining I think it might be worthwhile to go ahead and anneal the stock this is called Rod steel and typically with cold rolled there's going to be a fair amount of stresses built up in the part from the Rolling process the internal microstructure is going to be crushed and deformed and as a result these stresses can cause the part to warp especially during Machining or heat treatment as those stresses will change and in some situations that will push the part out of tolerance or especially after Heat Treating that will require surface grinding and if you don't have a surface Grinder like I don't that can cause a bit of an issue so to cover myself in the future or spend a bit of time now to stress relieve the parts and that should hopefully reduce the tendency for warping when I finally get around to hardening it this might not completely eliminate the chance of warping but it should help and the process here is going to be directly dictated by the information supplied by the metal manufacturer so the process for doing this is thankfully quite simple I'll start off by heating the parts in the furnace thank you now the spec she'd given to me states that the metal needs to be heated to at least 900 Degrees Celsius which is roughly a dark orange glowy one and getting this large chunk of metal to that temperature took about 30 to 40 minutes with my setup and once the outside reaches 900 Degrees Celsius it needs to stay at this temperature for about one hour per 25 millimeters of thickness of the part so this part here is 50 mils in thickness so I left it at this temperature for about two hours less time than that and the part risks not being fully heated up to the center and all the stress being relieved and once that time is up I'll cover the top of the furnace and I'll leave it to cool down overnight the forge is insulated and it probably stayed hot for about seven to eight hours easily I know it stayed red for two hours and cooling all the way down easily took eight hours and this slow rate of cooling should hopefully produce a more ductile less stressed part and that is the annual part it may not have been 100 necessary but it could make the difference when I come around and Harden it as you can probably see though this did build up a fair amount of scale on the outside in a proper Heat Treating oven you'd pump in nitrogen to stop the oxygen from oxidizing the metal at high temperatures but given that I was always going to face the outside I didn't think it was hugely necessary to protect the metal and even if I wanted to I probably wouldn't use nitrogen I would have much rather seal it in clay to keep the air out speaking of which though let's quickly get the part in the mill and cleans up I'll first come in with a face Mill to remove a bulk of the material and then I'll come in with a fly cutter to get a better finish [Music] thank you thank you [Music] [Music] and that is the part squared up now the plan is going to be to machine both parts as one piece and then at the very end I can cut them in half doing it this way should help the parts match up and the V profile that I'm aiming to cut is 130 degrees and that was mostly dictated by the height and the width of the stock and that should allow me to clamp onto some very large pieces of round bar and also taking notes from the V blocks that Curtis made I'll be macheting a slot down the center so I can key it to the tables T slots that should hopefully make setting it up Square on the table a lot easier and quicker no I don't have any key Steel in the right size on a Hound but I do have some oversized Keys which I got with the dividing head so what I'll do is I'll machine these down to fit the T slots on my table so I'll use a fly cutter and the Dr road to come in and face these to size and the fit needs to be really spot on for these to properly work and by the end that is a really good fit so two of these would be for the V blocks and I'll probably use the two others for the vice speaking of which let's get the stock in the Vise get it centered on the dro and get the keyway cut out I'll be doing the Machining with a 10 millimeter End Mill and then I'll slowly open it up to the full 12 millimeters thank you doing it this way did take a fair amount of time but by the end we got a really good fish on the keys there's a bit of bite at the bottom which will lock the keys in once I add a screw and by the looks of things I've also run out of travel on the y-axis so I might need to knock four or five millimeters off the total width of this part [Laughter] all right so that's our holes drilled and tapped two in the center for the keys and two on each side to screw this to the Vise or screw them down to the mill table so let's get the part flipped over and we can finally Mill the V I've set up the part in the vice at a 25 degree angle and I'll be Machining inwards in order to create the V profile I'll be doing most of the metal removal with a set of face Mills this one here is able to machine up to a hard corner but it can only remove one to one and a half millimeters of metal in one pass the normal face smooth that I use can do two or three millimeter depth of cuts but it can't mule up to a hard Edge it leaves a 45 degree slope so what I'll do is I'll do most of the metal removal with the regular phase Mill and then I'll come in with the other one to finish up the profile all right and you know what that second face milk left a really great finish I can now flip the part in the vice and complete the other side in two or three passes and that is the V profile cut overall I'm really happy with how that turned out it's my first time using this new face mule and I left a really nice finish now I did debate putting in a slot in the bottom to relieve that corner but for such a wide V it's probably unnecessary plus it's usually only used for holding Square Parts in a regular square V block so in this application it's really not necessary the final thing left to do is cannibal those holes and then get the two parts separated and cleaned up foreign mode all in all I think they turned out looking really great and I'm really happy with how the project turned out but I guess looks aren't everything so let's get them set up and see how will they work I'll first test them out as V blocks so we'll start off by getting the keys installed in the bottom foreign and that is a fantastic fish in the tea slots with the v-blocks Now set up I can now place any large piece of round bar on the t-slots and get them ready for Milling obviously you'd want to clamp this down to the table but you get the idea of how a setup like this would work I'll also quickly point out that the V blocks here aren't actually bolted down to the table and that's because the V blocks are designed to use and make bolts to hold them down and I don't have any big t-nuts with M8 threads I can now start to set up the two-piece voice with the new Jaws and this is the setup that I'll be using next week as you can probably see we use the same holes to bolt the Jaws onto the vise and using the setup we can now hold down some very large pieces of round bar on the milling machine all right well that's the part now clamped down to the milling machine and ready to go as you can probably see we now have access to the entire top surface of the part and we don't have to move around any clamps overall really happy with how the part turned out and now we can start to machine this part down and that's about it for now hope you enjoyed this video thank you very much for watching see you next week

Channel: Artisan Makes

Views: 58,383

Keywords: heat treatment, annealing, tempering, facemill, face mill, milling machine, making v block, v blocks, vee blocks, vblocks, making tools, how to make a v block, large v blocks, making v blocks, making vee blocks, machining v blocks, machining vee blocks, how to make v blocks, how to make vee blocks, matched v blocks, set of v blocks, matched set of v blocks, matched pair of v blocks, ground v blocks

Id: AAGSsUpYdLo

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2023