Clamping Kits

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bosephus

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i need to buy a clamping kit for my shaper and brown and sharp mill .
the shaper has the smaller t slots of the two so i figure to buy a clamping to fit it and then just make t nuts to fit the mill .

i forgot to measure the t slots but they are either 3/8 or 7/16

my only real question is ,.. is there one brand i should look at versus another quality wise .

the little machine shop and grizzly kits both run about the same price and the enco/msc brands run about double the price of those two .
like most here if theres a definite step up in quality I'd rather spend a little more and be happy .
and if the quality difference is negligible I'd rather save a few bucks .

I'd much rather put the cash towards a good vice ,... but that's going to be a few months of saving to get

thanks ahead for the input
 
I have both the 3/8 and 7/16 sets from Grizzly. I've been happy with the quality... I mean after all, they're just hold-down clamps...
 
I have Enco and Grizzly. They're probably made in the same place. Both work fine.
 
The best ones commonly seen are Teco and Gibraltar, and the prices match the quality. Depends on how much you plan to use them, how much extra money you have, and how fussy you are about such things. Like kismit99 said, they are just hold down clamps. I am using a cheap import set I got from Enco and they work fine. It is worth chasing all the threads with a tap and a die to remove any roughness and to make sure they spin together easily with a thumb and forefinger. It is really annoying when they do not. The high dollar ones thread together like silk and also have flats in the middle of the studs to grip them with. Blow the chips out of them when you put them away...

Edit: Don't tap all the way through the t-nuts. They have an intentionally damaged or incompletely cut thread at the bottom of the nuts to stop the bolts or studs from damaging the bottom of the t-slots.
 
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I have two sets of clamps here, a 7/16" set that came from Enco, and a 3/8" set that came from Shars if I remember correctly. Both are good but the I had to chase the threads on some of the studs in the 7/16" set, just to clean them up so they would thread smoothly. The racks that they come in are plastic and sheet metal; nothing to write home about. They all work just fine.

I also have a third set that uses 1/4"-20 socket head cap screws. The fingers are made from aluminum and the set included thirty screws of five different lengths, six clamps and six steel spacers, all on a nice little storage block. These get used with a fixture plate that has the 1/4"-20 holes in it already. I have been quite surprised at how much I use them for small parts. They were purchased from a fellow on another forum several years back.
 
Thanks guys , I don't feel bad about being thrifty now that I've got your feed back .

Money is an issue and the differance between buying a set from shars / grizzly / lms
Is being able to buy a set now and having something I can use . And waiting another month saving up
 
And, you can make your own T nuts out of scrap.
However, buying a few Grade 8 bolts in assorted lengths is handy.
If the length isn't right a few washers take up the difference.

Daryl
MN
 
Just a rant .

Monday morning I got online to order a clamping kit .
I decided to go with grizzly at first . Unfortunately the kit I want is out of stock , so I went to little machine shop because they had the next best price .
Everything was going great untill it came to check out and I seen what they wanted to charge for shipping .

To be fair I expected to pay around $15 or so for the shipping . .. noo, not even close .

Lms shipping charges for the clamping kit ... $37 yea $6 less then the cost of the clamping kit .
Then I noticed other options and seen priority mail, woo hoo .. a medium flat rate box is reasonable to send .
Haha... not with lms they want to charge $50 for the privilege of using flat rate shipping :/

I have to say it will be a very cold day down In heck before I ever give little machine shop a single dime of my money .

But I guess that's the business model suck you in with cheap prices and rape you on the shipping .

Grizzly' s shipping was $17 .. so not far off what I was expecting .

Before I got discouraged after realizing I don't have enough cash to buy a clamping kit I decided to check the cost of using ups myself .

Estimating the box size at roughly shoe box size and weighing $20 lbs my cost from ups was $17.45 from my zip to lms's zip .

Rant over ... and no clamping kit for me .
 
MSC has a promotion going for 40 percent off and free freight on orders over $49 through tomorrow, Wed. the 20th. The code is SAVE40. Check and see if that makes the deal worthwhile. I have given up on MSC...
 
It brings the price down to reasonable levels for sure , but still out of my reach at the moment .

Truth be told I shouldn't be spending the money anyways so it's not exactly a bad thing .
I'll try again in a month or two once I have a few more bucks saved
 
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