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As a little follow up, a buddy brought over a bigger pump, either 3 or 5 cfm (I still need to look it up) and thought it's not as good a vacuum as the other sides, it's much better and strong enough to machine with.

I'm not going to run out and buy another pump though as I'm pretty sure I'm going to do the 4th axis thing.

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Andy, I'm curious how you would clamp a neck for machining on all four sides on a rotary 4th axis.
I'm surprised that you wouldn't use vacumn.
Nelson

So, my thought is to have a nub type thing on the top and the bottom of the neck. Bottom would go into a 4 jaw chuck and the top into a live center in a tail stock.

Once all 4 sides are machined, I'd do one last operation face down in a vacuum fixture or, just clean up by hand.

The problem is that maintaining alignment on all sides is difficult. With a 4th, so long as I do a good job aligning it to begin with I should be ok. Instead of 2 to 4 tool changes per side, I'll have 4 tools grand total.

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