As mentioned previously, I made up some soft jaws to hold 4in round stock in a 6″ vise. My goal was to prepare stock for workholding on the Pocket NC v2-50 to machine prototypes of the front and back housing for the reduced weight moteus servo mk2.
Now, I’ve used those soft jaws to trim down both pieces of stock to the correct length, bore a center hole, and in the case of the front housing, remove a bunch of additional material in a more expeditious manner. There’s not much more to it than that, so here’s the video:
While working to build the reduced weight moteus servo mk2, I got tired of hand machining the first operation on a manual mill and lathe for the front and back housings. It was necessary, primarily to enable workholding on the PocketNC v2-50, but also because it allowed me to remove much of the excess material more quickly than could be done on the PNC. So, I got trained up on the AA CNC Bridgeport and went to town.
The manual work I did on the mill used V blocks to hold the round stock, but for this I wanted something that was more repeatable and would offer more gripping power. Thus I decided to try my hand at soft jaws for the first time. I got some blanks from MonsterJaws which would fit the vise there and got started.
For the CAD/CAM, I grabbed a random 6″ Kurt vise model from the interwebs and stuck my part in it. Then I added the vise blanks and used a “combine” operation to subtract out the stock from the blanks.
Then, when doing the CAM, I just ran a 3d adaptive followed by a finishing contour pass:
When I ran the actual toolpath, I messed up and had the spindle running about 1/3 of the speed I wanted, which made for some nice chomping noises, but it did cut.
A Modicum of Fun 