Mill – Tooling – Rotary Table

The world is not made of orthogonal parts, and if that’s all I could make I would be in pretty sad shape. Fortunately, there are tools to help work on non-linear surfaces. Ok, to work on truly curved surfaces you gotta turn to CNC, but the next best thing is to be able to work on round surfaces, and for that a Rotary Table is quite productive.

Basically, a Rotary Table allows you to mount your part on a rotating surface. And it can give you the axis of rotation in either a vertical or horizontal orientation – some allow you to mount it in one or the other, and some even allow you to select an angle in between. Some allow you to rotate (aka, index) the surface to discrete positions and others give you the ability to carefully dial in an angle. Some allow you to clamp parts on a plate, and others in a chuck.

I have a big one that mounts both vertically and horizontally, has both a rotating dial and an indexing feature, and a fixture that can accept either a plate or chuck to mount parts on. Even on the number of parts I’ve made on my mill, I have used this rotary table in every configuration, and find it to be one of the most useful and versatile tooling fixtures I have.

One of the very first parts I made on my mill with this rotary table was chuck to insert in my cordless drill to turn the angle dial automatically rather than cranking on a handle – at 90 revolutions of the hand crank to 1 rotation of the table, it gets to be quite a tedious exercise. It’s not like I do lathe work on it, but it is quite handy for smooth, rapid rotation.