Soft jaws were the answer, I fought them for 8 years

I used to think soft jaws were just for lazy setups, like you were cheating somehow. My old lead at a shop in Dayton always pushed hard jaws with aluminum shims and I bought into that for a long time. Last month I had a job with thin walled steel tubes, 0.06 wall, and they kept distorting no matter what I tried. Out of frustration I finally milled a set of soft jaws from some scrap 6061 and it took me about 20 minutes. The run out dropped from .008 to .0015 and I got all 300 parts done without a single reject. Now I feel dumb for wasting so many hours wrestling with shims and torque settings. Anyone else hold out on soft jaws because of some old habit from a previous shop?

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avery_jackson4d ago

Eight years of stubbornness and all it took was 20 minutes and some scrap aluminum to fix it. I bet your old lead would have a heart attack if he saw those soft jaws, but who's laughing now with that .0015 runout. Sounds like the shims were the real crutch the whole time, not the soft jaws.