What Is a Try Plate?
A try plate is a type of jig used in machining. It is an L-shaped or cube-shaped jig used to attach the product to be machined at right angles to the base surface.
Each face is made of a quality flat surface with no unevenness, and the L-shaped part or cube has a precise 90-degree angle.
A try plate has tapped holes, through holes, and long holes for attaching jig components such as clamps and workpiece guides, allowing for a wide variety of processing on various products.
Uses of Try Plates
Try plates are used for the following applications:
- Beveling the Workpiece on the Surface Plate
When drilling or tapping a workpiece with a drill plate, try plates are used to mark the hole positions in advance.
The workpiece to be machined is set at the exact 90-degree angle made by the surface plate and try plates, and a line is drafted with a needle or the like, taking the dimensions from the edge of the workpiece. - Use for Horizontal Machining Sensor Jigs
Because the spindle of a horizontal machining center is horizontal, the product to be machined must be mounted parallel to the spindle. Therefore, the try plate jig is used to clamp the workpiece for drilling, milling, etc.
Principles of Try Plates
Try plates are used as a jig for machining products on a horizontal machining center.
Since the quality of the workpiece clamped on the try plates is greatly affected by the accuracy of the try plates, the structure of the try plates has important principles and principles.
The spindle of a horizontal machining center faces parallel to the floor and is perpendicular to the workpiece fixed to the try plates jig facing it.
If the relationship between the spindle and the workpiece deviates from 90 degrees, the flat surface of the workpiece will be machined at an angle when milling, for example.
As a countermeasure, the try plates itself can be milled on a horizontal machining center.
In this way, the workpiece mounting surface of the try plates are finished to the same accuracy as the spindle.
However, in a production line using a pallet changer, one try plates jig may be mounted on several horizontal machining centers.
Since each of these horizontal machining centers has a slightly different spindle orientation, it is not possible to finish the try plates surface to fit all of them.
In such cases, the jig’s swivel function of the horizontal machining center is used to tilt the origin intentionally and process the work perpendicularly.