Aluminum Plate Work on the Haas VMC
Aluminum plates clamped directly to the table of a Haas vertical machining center for face and profile milling, the bread-and-butter setup for brackets, cover plates and fixture bases.
Plate work looks simple and hides the two things that decide whether the parts pass: flatness after the clamps come off, and hole position across a long part. Clamping directly to the table with low, even pressure and facing both sides in sequence keeps the plate from springing when it is released; picking up a datum edge with the probe before the profile pass keeps hole patterns true to the finished edge rather than to the raw sawn one.
For quantities, several plates are run per cycle on one table. Standard plate thicknesses are used wherever the drawing allows, because a 0.500 in finished thickness cut from 0.625 in stock costs less than one machined from 0.750 in; the metal weight and stock calculator in our library shows the arithmetic.
Machined at C&W Manufacturing, Turlock, CA. AS9100D and ISO 9001:2015 certified, ITAR registered.
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