Hard jaws vs soft jaws for a one off job, I picked wrong

Had to run 40 pieces of 4140 prehard last week and couldn't decide between hard jaws and cutting soft jaws. Went with soft jaws because I thought I'd need a better grip, but the extra setup time ate my whole afternoon. Anyone else find soft jaws overkill for short runs or am I just impatient?

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stellam8920d ago

Oh come on, you can't blame the jaws for that one. Soft jaws are never overkill when you're running 4140 prehard, that stuff will spin in hard jaws faster than you can say "check the torque". The real problem is you treated this like a one-off when you had 40 parts, that's a production run buddy. You spend 30 minutes cutting those soft jaws once and then every part after that grips perfect with zero worries about marks or slipping. Hard jaws would've had you fighting with inconsistent diameters and wondering if that last part walked off center after the first cut. Next time just accept the setup time as part of the job and be glad you didn't scrap your whole batch over saving an afternoon.