Quick-Change Demo For Vises and Trunnions

by Richard Miller
6 min read

Hey guys, it's Rick at Elijah Tooling.

Give me about ten minutes of your time this time, and I'll make it worth your
while.

Okay, today what we're going to do is a demonstration we did for a customer, or prospect, yesterday.

We thought, "You know, this is really cool. We ought to show the rest of the world".

So what we're going to do, is we're going to load our vices, we're going to load a part, we're going to probe it in, we're going to cut it.

And I'm not gonna waste a lot of your time doing the cutting part.

But then, we're going to unload it, unload the part, unload the vices.

And then, we're going to go to the next step; which is to load our trunnion. Load it, load a part and start it up.

What's the point? Well, we're trying to show you how fast you can load and unload your parts, of course.

And then, also how fast it is to bring the trunnion in, and precisely locate it;
get it into place and start machining with it.

Now we've done another video on that, and we did show the time.

But I don't think we've shown the sequence where we do part on, part off, part on, part off.

So here we go. Steve's gonna help me out, and I'm gonna just narrate what he's doing: so we've got the flex vise.

Like I've said before, he gets the old junk and fortunately, they still work
really great, but he does not have the latest models.

Those are not black for one, but they work great.

What's he doing right now?

He's pulling up Xzertz™ that locate them.

So, we call those retractable dowel pins.

And then, he likes to stabilize that, the gripper.

So he's gonna put Xzertz™ behind it.

Right now he's pulling up the fasteners into the parts.

So isn't that something?

Huh I don't know how long that took, but not very long.

And yeah we should be timing this, so you'll get an idea of what's going on in time.

But, you can already figure out it's pretty fast.

Now the reality is that we know exactly where we're at, because we
are using the modular fixture.

And the modular fixture is precisely made and it has a precise pattern on it.

So, we know exactly where we're putting these pieces.

Now, he's gonna probe it in any way, but if you've used a probe before, you know
that it's got to be at least in the general vicinity.

Here we go, we're going to do a little bit of probing.

And then, he's just going to take a cut.

We're trying to make this as practical as possible, and what you guys would actually do in this circumstance.

As you can see, it's picking up the center of the part.

And then, it's also going to pick up the edge.

So, on this machine, we can skew the program minutely by the angle.

If there is any angle, we don't think there is, but we might as well check against that.

Here we go, just a really fast program.

Nothing coming off of there, because we did this in the demo yesterday.

But, no worries!

This is just for demonstration purposes.

What we want to see is: how fast this stuff goes on and off.

Here we go, so we're gonna unload the part.

Loading, unloading don't take very much time.

And then, we're going to unload the vices.

Now, remember that we're using Invert-A-Bolt™ fasteners to hold devices.

So what he's doing is there are threaded holes underneath the vise, where the fasteners been picked up from, from below.

So what he was doing is clearing the hole there, so that we can get to the fastener.

And then, we zip them down.

And there you go.

Pretty fast huh? Now he's still got to lower the Xzertz™.

But, the great thing about Xzertz™, is they just kind of live there, and we can lower them, or raise them as we wish and as we need them.

They're nice to have in the fixture at all times.

So that we're not running around the shop looking for our dowel pins.

They also facilitate what is about to happen with the trunnion, and that is we're going to slide a plate across that table.

And then, instead of trying to drop dowels from the top, we're gonna raise
the Xzertz™ retractable dowels up into the fixture plate.

So you can slide that plate right across, so there are no obstructions to what we're doing.

And this is our niche in the world.

We are making fixturing in which there are no obstructions to the machine, or the installation of our tooling parts, whatever it is that we're doing.

As you can see that's a pretty fast process, we already have a video regarding the roller cart that he's using there.

But just take note, that was pretty easy and our trunnion lives on that cart
that's its home.

We don't have to worry about picking it up and dropping it off
anything like that.

All right now what is he doing?

Well, he's gonna line the alignment holes in the quick change plate, with the Xzertz™ in the modular fixture, raised the Xzertz™.

Remember we're timing this.

So normally the setup of a trunnion like this takes a considerable amount of time.

In our case, it's not going to take that much time.

We locate, we always located on two pins.

Right?

You guys know this.

Not three pins, not one pin.

So, he's a rotated the plate over and now we're going to get the second pin.

Now when you seem using the pneumatic tool, you know he's bringing up the fasteners into the quick-change plate.

So, the fasteners are what are going to hold it in place.

The Xzertz™ retractable dowel pins are what are locating it.

And like I said, we've done this before on video.

We've demonstrated the preciseness of this operation and in this particular
case all we're trying to demonstrate is the speed of the setup.

Now he's going to be installing one of our risers.

And the risers you can see is actually a mini modular fixture.

It has four Invert-A-Bolt™ fasteners in the top, it has two ZipBushings™ with Xzertz™ locations there.

And then, it also can you see the two counterbored holes, so it's possible
to drop bolts through there and hold it that way as well.

So in his case: what he just did, is he pulled up a fastener into it, it's being held with fasteners.

But, if you do not have the Invert-A-Bolt™fasteners and you're more of a legacy type manufacturer, you haven't moved to our equipment yet, you can still use this
riser.

And actually, our modular vices are all the same, they can be used with socket head cap screws.