My first Super­Soft Jaw movie was a good exam­ple for thin parts. But it neglected to show another strength — securely hold­ing on to del­i­cate objects for light machine work. I’ve brought along Tormach’s good friend Ed as a spe­cial guest star for this movie. Ed is a tin­kerer and inven­tor here in Madi­son. He’s been involved in small CNC machines for since the 80’s and actu­ally did the major­ity of the design work for the Super­Soft Jaw prod­uct — tak­ing it from an off-the-wall idea to a use­ful hard­ware kit.

Ed kept men­tion­ing that he could use Super­Soft Jaws to firmly hold an egg in the vise, so I asked him come over and show us how it was done. The “Egg machin­ing” por­tion of the video, how­ever, is com­pletely self indul­gent. The long ver­sion of the clip below shows how the setup is done:

From very lim­ited expe­ri­ence, I can tell you that the best way to cut Egg Shell is High RPMs and slow speeds — I had best luck with our Kress com­pan­ion spin­dle kit. And if you plan to use a Right-handed end­mill to scram­ble, run the Spin­dle CCW. That’ll keep the egg inside the shell — it kind of works like an immer­sion blender.

Here’s the last two min­utes of the movie again. Straight to the Punch­line, for those who like to skip to the back of the book.

Home Shop machin­ist Pass Along Tips:

Speak­ing of Cre­ative Work­hold­ing, I just received this Pass Along tip from Vil­lage Press in my mail­box today:
Using PVC Pipe as a Stop for Fac­ing Oper­a­tions
If you aren’t already get­ting these, its free to sign up. You can sign up here to get on the mail list.
Its a great source for learn­ing about those clever machin­ist tricks that nobody ever tells you about.

Be Socia­ble, Share!

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About Andrew Grevs­tad

With over ten years of pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ence in advanced man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems, dig­i­tal design tools, and applied soft­ware, Andy Grevs­tad has worked in prod­uct devel­op­ment and tech­ni­cal sup­port for Tor­mach since 2008. Grevs­tad has received engi­neer­ing degrees from Michi­gan Tech­no­log­i­cal Uni­ver­sity and a M.S. and Uni­ver­sity of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to Dig­i­tal Machin­ist mag­a­zine and also blogs weekly about CNC milling and related top­ics on the Tor­mach blog, Milling Around.