Taking advantage of talon grips in our shop.
We are starting to take on quick prototype jobs that means we need to be ready to take many different size jobs and do the job quickly.
There are 3 main ways to handle this.
1. Order material for each job (not practical due to quick turnarounds required)
2. keep tons of different-sized materials on hand. (this gets expensive and takes up space)
3. keep oversized material on hand and machine down. (expensive and is a waste of resources)
Our new option
The talon grips really hold onto aluminum, allowing us to rough cut stock out of larger pieces of material. This was something that I didn't like doing before.
Trying to hold a piece of metal that was rough cut on multiple sides was asking for trouble especially in high-speed machining.
This isn't for everyone or every job though.
If you need to make 200 of a part it makes sense to buy the correct sized material and just machine it out. For us, we're doing 1-5 off parts for prototyping with a few day turnarounds so it takes very little extra time to make an additional cut on our bandsaw for the job.
Now I can purchase 6x?x12 foot sticks and cut them down into almost any size instead of buying the correct size for the job thus allowing us to cut down on the stock sizes required to keep on hand by less than 1/4 of what we needed before to take on almost any job.
With the Carve smart jaws, we are able to quickly 1st op the parts then quickly swap to standard or soft jaws and finish the parts off.
This is a game-changer in our shop.