From a Rusty Plate to a Zero Point System for My Fly Press

My Zero Point fly press plate started with a rusty piece of mild steel I already had rolling around the shop.

It measured 8" × 12" × 3/4", and it offered a starting point for solving a problem I noticed when I bought my #5 Karachi fly press: the press table had a hole roughly three inches across. Without something spanning that opening, each piece of bottom tooling would need a large enough base to bridge it.

The press also had two mounting options. There were threaded holes at the front and rear of the table, which worked with the bolts and toe clamps supplied by Karachi. There were also two straight T-slots, one on either side of the opening.

Both arrangements felt limiting for the way I wanted to work. The threaded holes restricted where I could clamp from the front and rear. The T-slots offered another option, but they were deep, awkward to access, and time-consuming to use.

I wanted a more convenient foundation for my bottom tooling.

Making use of what I had

After designing and fabricating my fly press table, I turned my attention to that rusty plate.

It needed to do two things: span the large opening in the press table and provide more places to clamp tooling. My solution was to machine the plate and add an array of tapped 3/8"-16 holes.

I did the machining on my Syil X7. The result gave me more accessible clamping points without having to work down inside the press table’s T-slots.

My original tooling plate in use while punching a railroad spike.

I later showed that setup in my video, “#5 Fly Press in 2024: A Look at ALL of My Tools & Dies.” Viewers seemed to really like the plate and the small collection of tools I was using with it.

That plate was a useful step forward. The next idea came from another machine in my shop.

Borrowing an idea from the CNC mill

I bought a zero-point base plate from SilverCNC for my Syil. That system was considerably more involved than what I would eventually make for the fly press. It had two positions with four holes each, and it also had to handle machining forces that could try to lift the workholding off the plate.

What interested me was the ability to return a vise to a known position without starting the locating process over every time.

That same idea made sense for my fly press bottom tooling.

For the locating task I was trying to solve, my focus was positioning in X and Y: getting the bottom tool back into alignment directly beneath the ram. I designed my own Zero Point plate around two locating holes.

The goal was straightforward: make that alignment quick, accurate, and easy.

The first tool: a bottle opener slot die

The first bottom tool I made for the Zero Point plate was a 6 × 20 mm slot die for punching bottle openers.

I had already made a similar die for the old rusty base plate. That plate gave me more places to clamp, but getting the die lined up under the punch still took time and patience. Then I had to tighten everything down without losing that alignment.

At one point, I got it wrong by about a millimeter. The die was sitting too far back, and the punch nicked and damaged its edge.

That experience gave me a clear place to start with the Zero Point system.

I designed the new slot die around two 16 mm retention knobs that located it on the plate. With that arrangement, the die registered precisely beneath the punch every time I set it up.

The slot die in position beneath the punch on the Zero Point plate.

I made the new die from S7 steel to stand up to the rigors of blacksmithing. Hundreds of holes later, I still use it today.

The rusty plate had solved my first problem: spanning the opening in the press table and giving me accessible places to clamp. The Zero Point system addressed the next one: returning a tool to the position where I needed it.

The bottle opener die was the first tool I built around that idea. That was the beginning.