Quite a good video here

On a smaller bit of square bar, you could use two small lengths of angle, rather than four plates.

Bill

Yes, I wouldn’t want to have to clock in too many identical pieces in the 4 jaw for a single tapped hole in the end of each.

If the pieces are not significantly longer than the height of your vice jaws, square both ends with the side of an end mill,  and then stand them vertically in your vice against a 123 or V block on one side and vice stop on the other. If you have a DRO on your mill and the pieces are very close to identically sized in respect of  their 40mmx10mm measurement, you might get away with lining up several of them in the vice together to drill and tap.

It all depends how long your pieces are and, as Andrew says, how accurate the work needs to be.

For this kind of repetition on the lathe my first thought would have been to ‘jig’ them on a pile of blocks & angle plate on the boring table – then you only have to set up the first one and drop the following ones in.

Trying to quickly repeat 40×10 aluminium edge-wise in a four-jaw sounds worth avoiding..

All the answers thus far assume that the variation in stock size can be accommodated within the tolerance of the hole location.

I mention this as the original post gives neither a number for the desired accuracy nor any information on the source of the stock. It is safe to say that if all the stock was sliced off the same parent bar, it will be good enough.

If it comes from a bucket of bar end offcuts of many batches of material, at the least a few should be measured to confirm any variation in size.

On 24 January 2024 at 07:28 DC31k Said:

All the answers thus far assume that the variation in stock size can be accommodated within the tolerance of the hole location.

No they don’t, read and assimilate please!

Andrew

If each piece was cut off from the same length of aluminum bar stock then they should be fairly uniform. But not enough information is given to provide the best answer for what your doing. Just how many need to be done and to what level of accuracy? Within + – .020″ is a whole lot different than .001″ or less for the best and quickest method that might be used. And 10 or 10,0000 for part numbers also have different answers. And the same depending on if you have a mill or not. In industry and for multiple pieces, it would be rare today to use marking out and center punching. Vise stops or rudimentary part fixtures to index the part to the same datum location each time without further set up or measuring would be many times quicker. Without a mill, do a Google image search for what’s called a Keats Angle Plate. Many today don’t seem to have even heard of them. With one bolted to a lathe face plate and a bit of set up time for the first one, the rest should go pretty quick. Even quicker if you can also drill and tap the holes using the same set up.

3 and 4 jaw independent chucks are a huge help and probably not optional tooling for any lathe, but so is a face plate. And those chucks also have there own built in limitations in what they can or can’t physically do, or how long it may take with say an independent chuck. Go back far enough in our industrial history and either of these chuck types weren’t even invented yet. They still managed to machine every part they wanted and to very high levels of accuracy when required using a face plate and different part fixtures, or turning longer parts between centers.

While it’s a North American web site, the same should be available from a tool supplier where ever you happen to be. But I built my own version of one of those Keats Plates using the larger one of these. https://www.kmstools.com/magnum-1-3-8-quot-x1-5-8-quot-clamping-v-block.html And then bolted it to a secondary and sacrificial plate so that extra holes can be added to match the part off set verses the slots in my face plate. Building up a good selection of commercial bolts, studding and commercial or shop made tee nuts that fit your own face plates particular dimensions is imo just as important as having the same on any mill. If you can’t easily set up and hold the part well enough to resist the cutting loads, then you can’t machine it.