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New vise jaw product

On the irregular clamping front, here's one that is in current manufacture - but probably to pricey to ever buy!

 
A little over my budget, but, they are good for weird shapes.
We had a couple at RMS for working on Rubber Extrusion Roller Dies.
 
So what do you think @Janger , does the ball bearing design intrigue you? Is it more viable than the other design you were looking at?
The ball bearing approach is intriguing and I think it would more evenly distribute clamp pressure. Harder to make though. I'll keep working on the simpler design.
 
The other downside of the ball bearings is that they would allow secure clamping of irregular objects but not secure clamping in a reproducible position. That is, for many shapes you'd have to locate on a feature using edge finder, Haimer, DTI or whatever for each part after clamping. The ability to position duplicate parts accurately and without effort is a major benefit of soft jaws or of the Adaptix design.
 
The other downside of the ball bearings is that they would allow secure clamping of irregular objects but not secure clamping in a reproducible position
Th Matrix pin vise (which seems to have ball bearings) have solved that shortcoming. They have a proprietary system that locks all the pins in any configuration between changes.
 
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Just saw that Adam Savage had shown this on his tested youtube channel. The fractal vise now available for purchase. At ~$1600USD, it's 1/4 of the price of Norgren Adaptix soft jaw, but looks like it doesn't exactly work flawlessly out of the box. Who here's going to try one out?


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We used to machine ‘clamping jigs’ for insert cartridges at Ex-Cell-O.
They would accommodate holding weird shaped parts like the photo here.
A little creativity time can be well spent for $1700 !!
 

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