I found this in New Zealand - it’s heaps cheap - only about $15USD and trade tools normally only sells good stuff. That said I haven’t tried it out yet and you guys in the US would need to pay freight - but then I had to freight my whole machine
I wounder if you can get threaded rod made of something softer than aluminium with the same rigidity so it doesn’t damage the threads in the C3D Sea of holes bed, if I could find aluminium thread rod it would be no good because it would inevitably seize with the bed. But monkey vs gorilla is sometimes hard to judge with such small threads. I live on an island so we only have two sorts of tools, hammers and bigger hammers
Nice! Of course this is half of the set I identified. That would make it US$30 (for two sets) which is still a terrific price.
There’s not much information there. Can you contact them and find out the width the slot in the clamps? It has to be 0.242" (6.15 mm) for an M6 to work.
I wounder if you can get threaded rod made of something softer than aluminium with the same rigidity so it doesn’t damage the threads in the C3D Sea of holes bed,
Certainly one can find alternate material rods and Al alloy is one of them. I can just as easily strip threads with them as with steel rods/screws. Working with precision equipment one should learn how to use them safely and effectively.
That said, monkey tight, not gorilla tight, is pretty easy to learn. Use hex socket head screws! Turning the screw is then using a hex wrench and the feel is very similar to tightening the collect nut and collet.
The beds are MIC6 - tool quality Al alloy - are designed for threaded applications. That’s reasonably tough.
In a class, we teach how to tighten things… and discover how most things that people tighten are way over tightened!
You’ll discover that with step blocks and clamps you want different heights and clamp lengths for different situations. Expect to grow into a bunch as you get used to them… As @Randy says “Step block clamps are pretty versatile”.
I picked up a set after you posted, thanks for the heads up. They are pretty good for the price, especially for the Nomad’s size. Definitely want to make sure you miss these with your endmill though
@enl_public I just used PLA with 3 perimeters and 50% honeycomb in-fill. They are very solid but I made them quite thick. So i’m probably going to make some aluminium ones based off of @ApolloCrowe’s design
Sometimes there is not enough room for those step blocks, I really like these small clamps for the Nomad: 5 Small Clamps wiith step blocks.c2d (1.2 MB)
@ApolloCrowe You’re right they do take up a fair amount of room, the issue I had was the height when clamping thick oak panels; I have the old long z axis design on my shapeoko and so the z plate would sometimes crash into the top of the clamps!
As soon as I get one of those threaded tables from Edward I’m going to make a set of the ones like yours
Having a threaded hole allows you a fast and easy method is setting the clamp height. The clamp should be slightly higher in the back to provide optimal clamping pressure.