The difficulty in finding a vise to fit on the table of a Fryer CM-15 machining center comes from the extremely small table width, and how incredibly small the machine enclosure is. While the small enclosure permits a miniscule machine footprint, it also causes the table to move very close to the enclosure walls during operation. When a standard four-inch vise was placed on the machine table it collided with the machine enclosure, causing significant damage to the machine.
After a brief search, the only commercially available milling vise that was small enough to avoid colliding with the enclosure was the Kurt KTR-35. Unfortunately, the way the mounting holes on the vise lined up with the T-slots on the table caused the vise to overhang the table enough to cause another crash. To remedy this, I designed a simple adapter plate to center the vise on the milling table.
The two tapped holes on the plate line up with the KTR-35 original mounting holes. The holes at the edges of the plate are offset by just the right amount so that when the vise and adapter plate are mounted to the mill table T-slots the vise is centered. The adapter plate was designed to take up as little space on the mill table as possible, while still allowing enough purchase around the edges of the vise to hold the adapter plate down with toe clamps if the vise needs to be held at an odd angle. The channels around the periphery of the adapter prevent some of the coolant used in the CNC mill from seeping under the vise and causing corrosion.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints I did not have time to heat treat the material, so the plate was made from 4140 for durability. The raw stock was rough surface ground on one side and then clamped into the CNC mill where all drilling and profiling operations were completed excluding the backside chamfers. The face opposite the first side was then rough ground, and the backside chamfer operations were then completed in the CNC mill. The plate was then finish ground such that both faces were parallel within 0.0002” (0.00508 mm) when clamped to the mill table.
