Chicken or the egg dilemma, 5/8" tee nuts

RJSakowski said:
If you have a lathe, you can make a very workable tee nut on it. Make the diameter of the diameter wider than the width of the bottom of the slot and file each side as @Uglydog suggested.
Click to expand...
damn, I should have thought of that.


But then I still needed new larger clamping set for the new mill... but tomorrow I'll make nuts on the lathe
 
What I ended up doing was making "T" nuts with a hand-drill that lasted long enough to hold my vise to make a real T-nut. Get some flat bar wide enough/thin enough to fit in the bottom of your T slot, then drill and thread it. A piece of all-thread and a purchased nut, and viola,you're done! It'll last at least long enough to make real T-nuts on the mill.
 
You might want to check if the T nuts are threaded straight through.
It's a risk that the threaded rod scores the bottom of the T slot. Worse yet is when the T nut pushes up on the slot and potentially breaks out the top of the slot. Does that make sense?
An easy fix is to bung the threads on the bottom of the T nut with a punch.

Daryl
MN
 
Uglydog said:
You might want to check if the T nuts are threaded straight through.
It's a risk that the threaded rod scores the bottom of the T slot. Worse yet is when the T nut pushes up on the slot and potentially breaks out the top of the slot. Does that make sense?
An easy fix is to bung the threads on the bottom of the T nut with a punch.

Daryl
MN
Click to expand...
They're not thru threaded
 
Looks as though your problem is solved for the moment. But should you have a similar problem in the future, local retail machine shop suppliers may cost a little more but don't force you to buy a full set in order to get a few t-nuts. You can buy one if that was all that you really needed. So what I would have done was to go over to the placethat I usually use and buy just enough T-nuts to anchor my vise and then proceed to make more T-nuts until I had enough.
 
McMaster is also a good stopgap solution. They're cheap enough.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top