Accuracy is what Kurt Manufacturing vises are all about. The company has delivered its rugged products for more than 50 years. Recently, Kurt designed automated gauging and work-holding into its automated production system (APS) to control all functions and deliver a quality, near-perfect product.

To manufacture precise vise level flatness (0.001 in.) and parallelism (0.0004 in.) in its vises, two lesser-known but extremely important products are used in the company’s APS: Kurt Gaging and Kurt Custom Engineered Workholding. Both control the variables that occur in the APS’s machining, heat-treating, and grinding operations as the system processes eight different models and sizes of its Anglock vise (figure 1).

Figure 1: Unfinished Anglock vice bodies are shown prior to automated loading into one of the systems’ grinders.

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