making vise clamps on the milling machine

Step 3 Clean up the long edges

I set up the angle iron in the milling vise and milled the long cut edges nice & flat (& somewhat to size, though this dimension is not terribly important).

The pictures show the setup for milling the two long sides. The rounded end of the angle-iron fits into the horizontal V-groove in the movable jaw of the vise. The edge that I'm milling is sticking out 1/4 inch or so past the vise jaws. This setup was plenty secure.

I eyeballed the workpiece to find the part that was sticking out the most, and gently touched off the cutter at that point. Then I started doing cutting passes in the Y direction, front to back, so each pass was done in conventional milling mode (I'm staying away from climb milling for now). Each pass took off about 0.010 inches of material, on whatever parts of the workpiece were sticking out. Eventually it cut along the whole face of the workpiece, and then I did a 0.005 inch finishing cut and called it done.

I used a 3/4 inch 4-flute milling cutter spinning at something like 800 rpm. Feedrate was probably about 5 or 7 ipm. Depth of cut (of each cut) was about 0.010 inch. I occasionally squirted WD-40 on the cutter and workpiece while cutting.

To mill the other long side I flipped the workpiece upside down (as shown in the second picture). The location of the V-groove in the vise jaw and the length of the foot (the short leg of the angle iron) conspire to make this possible. If the dimensions hadn't worked out I could have kept the workpiece in the "foot-up" orientation and slid the workpiece to the other side of the jaws.