Using paper for added traction

[Rotate]

I remember reading that you can slip a piece of paper between the bed and the work when clamping it down to increase traction. Does a normal piece of paper provide sufficient parallelism? Depending on the clamping, wouldn't the paper get compressed differently causing the work to tilt slightly?

Albert

[SGW]

Not enough to matter for anything you (or I) are likely to do. Paper is pretty uniform. I doubt you'd be able to measure the error.

This assumes, of course, that your clamping is "sensible," but you'd want to do that whether there is interposed paper or not.

[spope14]

paper will not cause problems in parallism that I havce seen. I use it between surfaces for milling and grinding.

I regularly use paper on my angle irons when grinding to prevent swirly marks from the indicating (moving on the iron)of the edge parallel for grinding. This is between a finished surface and the iron. I do use that brown paper towel stuff.

I have also put paper on the mill table when clamping for the same reason, and to help when milling the soft stuff from picking up table marks - though this is limited.

I may get .0001 difference from this, but not that much in most cases.

[Thrud]

Albert
You should not have any problems with it - I would not use the gloss or smooth finished paper though. It is pretty tough to crush it under normal clamping conditions.

Paper is extra handy when milling if your table is a hard anodised affair like the Sherline lathe/mills.

You may want to double check your measurements (the paper can add a few thou to the height depending on the weight of paper used) if you reference your endmills from the table if the cut is critical.

[This message has been edited by Thrud (edited 05-29-2002).]