The Home Machinist!

Having seen tooling plates in pictures and marveling at how convenient they appeared to be, I decided I should have one too.

Looking at the situation further... what do you do about chips?!

I haven't seen any pictures of plates with plugs in the unused holes. And if you raised the plate up on standoffs so the chips could fall through, keeping the underneath relatively clean would be difficult. And simply ignoring it might not be a good idea if you were using water-based coolant.

Compressed air clears out the holes.

Vacuum cleaner.....

Pete

It's easy to cover unused holes, I use teflon baking sheets cut for my regularly used fixtures, masking tape for one-offs.

Here is my fixture plate. Just uses little plastic plugs. The design has hardened bushings for about 12mm down from the surface so you can use dowels as fences. The plugs fit in the smooth section. A few are missing I need to replace. Fixture plate is too small for my machine but I got it used for a good price. Correct one is about $5k so making due for now.

I'm glad you brought this up as it sparked an idea for me. Since my mill is so small it only has 1 T-slot, mounting a vise parallel with the slot is an exercise in clamping innovation. If I had a tooling plate to bolt the vise to, it would simplify things.
Thanks for adding a new project to the already over sized list.
--earlgo

I have a 15" square tooling plate that came off a cross-slide rotary table. All the holes are plugged with 3/8" setscrews.

Flathead screws made from threaded rod might be better than socket head set screws; you could use a pick to clean the slot before unscrewing them, rather than trying to dig or blow chips out of the socket.

I have a tooling plate I harvested from a scrapped machine. I also have concrete anchors at various points in my slab for things like my big manual tube bender (roll cages and such). I have to cut bolts or stud to length somewhat frequently. I take the drop stubs, make appropriate length, and slot them to make what are effectively slotted set screws. Keeps the concrete anchors clear as well as the tooling plate and other tooling holes I want to protect. For example, the outer jaw mounts on my Kurt clone, and t-nuts that stay captured within my chip confinement system on my mill table, though the latter I make longer to remove by finger most of the time. They all perform their function flawlessly, come out easily, and use what would otherwise be wasted threaded remnants.