Vevor?  Not looking for a good quality product?  Personally I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole.  I only buy from that supplier if I am confident I can live with, or fix, the likely issues.

All the smaller rotary tables are inherently short of space to accommodate work holding clamps. In my view the 8″ – 200 mm size being the smallest that can satisfactorily exploit the common import Tee nut, stud and step block sets without too much futzing around. Even then it’s all pretty tight.

Best answer is a grid of tapped holes plate semipermanently fitted to the rotary table. I reckon 5 spot dice pattern on 1″ – 25 mm centres with 1/4″ or M6 threads works pretty well for most things. If you do predominantly very small work consider a tighter spacing with M4 or M5 threads. The optical lab equipment companies make aluminium breadboards with this sort of hole pattern that aren’t completely unaffordable if you don’t fancy tapping all those holes for example Thor labs:-

https://www.thorlabs.com/navigation.cfm?guide_id=45

is the index page for theirs. Other firms do similar things. Or maybe half the price from AliExpress.

For small work very simple sheet metal, 3 or 4 mm is plenty thick enough, bent L shape clamps with a slot or choice of bolt holes to take the fixing stud or screw work pretty well. Easy DIY and no tears lost if you cut into, or even through, one. Thicker, more engineered ones can have jack screw, with a foot so it doesn’t chew the table surface, can cover a greater range. On my little BCA I found a knurled knob on the jack screw, rather than a proper hex or allen socket, generated perfectly adequate clamping forces for small stuff and small cutters.

Clive

I’ll second Clive’s suggestion of a tapped sub table if you opt for a smaller table. Makes clamping so much easier and in some cases the only way possible. Here’s the one I made for my 4″ table, holes are tapped 10-32 on a 3/8″ grid. (My workshop is, for the most part, non metrificated !)

John

A T-slotted plate with parallel rather than radial slots can be handy too (pictured on a dividing head here, but handy on a rotary table too):

The dividing head is from Vevor by the way, the spring clip on the sector arms needed a little filing, but good value nonetheless.

Teucher, I assume you are actually wanting a rotary table, not a rotary vice? Always good to use common names for items here.

Used the way I use it a 6″ rotary table being a good fit on my WM18,  I guess it would be a shade too big on a WM16.

Headroom is the main issue.

• When the table is mounted vertically, say for making gears, it eats more than 7″ of height!  Depending on what you do, it might well get in the way.
• Headroom is less of an issue when the table is horizontal except I usually fit a 3-jaw chuck because it’s the quickest and easiest way for me to hold the majority of the work I do.   The problem is that a big 3-jaw chuck mounted on top of a rotary table also eats a lot headroom.

So, a 6″ or 8″ rotary table isn’t bonkers on a WM16 provided it’s mostly mounted flat without a chuck. I bought a 6″ rotary table for my WM18 because it covers both vertical and horizontal cutting, and there’s still enough room for a chuck – mostly. Not sure the same table would deliver so well on a WM16 because there’s less space for it.

Note Tony’s warning about weight too – an 8″ rotary table is heavier than I care to lift on my own.

Whether or not to invest in a tailstock for the table is another ‘it depends’ question.   The work I do almost never requires one, so maybe a waste of money.  However, when a couple of jobs needed end-support, I was delighted to have one.

Dave

One comment on Rotary rables, my preference is for one with a 90:1 ratio.

This should give greater because one turn of the handle provides only 4 degrees rotation of the table.

At times this can be a nuisance but makes calculations a little easier (A 40:1 ratio means 9 degrees per turn of the handle, a 36:1 means 10 degrees per turn).

If you have any ambitions of gear cutting, then buy the division plates, and a Tailstock.

I aligned the tailstock to my HV6 by boring a 2MT blank arbor to be a close fit in the barrel of the Tailstock.

With the clamp screws loose on the tailstock, inserting the barrel into the bore of the arbor, in the HV6, aligns the tailstock for height,so that the clamp screws can then be tightened.

The key ways on the tailstock wer different from the T slots on the mill, so I made up and fitted stepped dowels.

HTH

Howard