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Posted 20 hours ago

DFM A2 Steel Dowel Plate 17 Holes MADE IN USA (English 17 Holes)

£32.305£64.61Clearance
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ZTS2023
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With a fixture plate, you measure the location once, and so long as you always install the fixture in the same holes, you won’t need to measure again. In addition, if we have to thread a shorter length to make room for a Locating Dowel Pin, we reduce the amount of thread available for fastening. What will that do to the strength and stability of our workholding solution? If we make one hole perform both functions, we reduce the tolerance and repeatability with which we can perform the Location function. Imagine dropping a dowel pin down two bores. One is half or even 1/3 as long as the other. Remember, we’re talking 1/2″ diameters in bores that are 3/4 to maybe 0.8″ deep. There’s a chamfer at the top and bottom so we have even less length available. Which bore is going to hold the pin more accurately vertical and in position? We can bolt fixtures onto the mill table just fine with T-Slots. So why use a fixture plate at all? Tosa Tool’s Fixture Plates are not the cheapest available, but they’re very economical when you consider how well they’re made and what the alternatives are that include similar features.

Suddenly our Fixture Plate is a lot less convenient to use. The alternative is we loosen up tolerances and make bigger holes in the sub-plate. Of course that means it will be positioned less accurately. Install 2 T-Slot Nuts in the top and bottom T-Slots on the left. Position them at the end of the T-Slot.

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The Tosa Tool Fixture Plates are well made and have some premium features found on much more expensive plates and not available from the other inexpensive vendors. Here are my favorites: You have to consider two things. First is the cost of the material is significant. Second is the accuracy is not that easy to attain, particularly for a plate that will be larger than the travels of your machine. Unless you’re an exceptional machinist, you probably won’t be able to build a plate larger than your machine’s travels that is also accurate enough.

I don’t know about you, but that’s just a lot of work. If you enjoy it, great, go for it. But I can’t see you’re going to save an awful lot of money. And if you manage to screw up? Dang, that’s an expensive piece of work material to replace. Like what you read on CNCCookbook? Installing the Tosa Tool Fixture plate took a grand total of about 20 minutes. Making sure it was set up correctly was easy to do using their key system. But it gets worse. Let’s say I want to make a little sub-plate that drops on to the fixture plate. We’ll use dowel pins to position the sub-plate and bolts to hold it down. This is a very common scenario when putting, for example, a plate fixture, down on the Fixture Plate. We can make the install go even faster by using a sub-plate that the vise is mounted to. Tosa Tool makes one just for that purpose. Build Your Own Fixture Plate One way to improve on an aluminum plate is to install hardened bushings. Of course this will negate most if not all the cost advantage. One can also choose to install the hardened bushing only on holes that become damaged.Here’s another advantage of Fixture Plates–they make machining parts that are too big for your machine’s travel easier. Soon you’ll wonder why you wasting so much time setting things manually! Fixture Plate Review: Tosa Tool Fixture Plate I’m using some dowel pins that are part of Tosa’s modular fixturing kit. It comes with a variety of gizmos. Here are just a few of the locating pin variety:

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