Clamping

Ian Priest gives some thought to this important topic and its consequences.

Some time ago I read with interest a debate on the Model Engineers’ Workshop forum regarding the various methods employed to clamp jobs or pieces of equipment to machine tables be they milling, lathe, shaping or any other.

In particular one contributor asked the greater audience to consider how to avoid sections of a ‘Tee’ slotted machine bed from breaking when clamping down. This is not an uncommon issue, in the past I’ve seen articles on how model engineers have made good, broken sections of machine tables. Indeed, in industry there are companies whose sole business is the repair of similar disasters. Therefore, as model engineers we are not alone, much better however to avoid the situation in the first place.

I would perhaps suggest the following as a more suitable way of securing our various bits and bobs to our precious machine tables. However, before we do that the requirements of any clamping solution needs to be considered.

Considerations

Be strong and robust enough to perform the required task. This sounds pretty much a given but the clamping solution needs to be ‘only just strong enough’ and not so big and powerful that any judicious over tightening is injurious to the machine.

Be safe, again a given but although we want our clamping system to be up to the job of securing items to a machine table we don’t want it to be so powerful that the inexperienced can easily over do it causing damage to the machine. We need a failsafe mechanism incorporated into the clamping system.

Be flexible, not in terms of use, in that sense we need it to be as rigid as possible, but insomuch that it easily lends itself to a variety of applications. I find it very frustrating at times not to have at hand just what I need to bolt something down.