In this post we review the MKS-Newport “UP-1A Universal Baseplate.” This is another very useful item to have in your lab. It has applications for testing, measurements, and for tooling. We purchased this product from MKS-Newport at the normal retail price.
Sometimes the pattern of holes on an optical breadboard simply do not work well for your tooling or experiment. In other cases you might not have access to any breadboard. Here is another inexpensive part from Newport which can help to address these situations.
Newport’s model UP-1A Universal Baseplate is a helpful part to have in your opto-mechanical bag of tricks. This item is a small square machined aluminum plate with multiple tapped holes and a slot which is located in the center. It is normally supplied with a matte black surface finish.
It is 2.56″ by 2.56″ and it is about 7/16″ thick. It has an array of 18 through holes tapped with 1/4-20 threads, and 4 holes with #6-32 threads. It also has a central slot which is counterbored, to accept a quarter-20 screw and will clear the head of a socket head cap screw. We will discuss that slot in just a bit.
The UP-1A Universal Baseplate has five 1/4-20 tapped holes along each side of the plate. (The holes in each corner of this plate will count for two sides.) Thus, there are a total of 16 threaded holes around the sides, and these are all spaced on 0.5″ centers. There are two additional 1/4-20 tapped holes in the interior, spaced on 1″ centers, on either side of the slot. That’s a total of 18 holes with 1/4-20 threads through this plate. There are also four holes provided with #6-32 threads spaced on what would be the corners of a 1.25″ square pattern, centered on the plate. Newport describes these holes as being useful for mounting their 40 mm x 40 mm stages. (These items are not described here.)
The Universal Baseplate can be used in a generic way to mount parts for tooling. However, the feature of this design which makes this plate so useful is its central slot. By using a single quarter-20 socket head cap screw to retain the plate to a breadboard, then sliding and rotating the UP-1A as needed before tightening that screw, you can provide a pattern of holes in an arbitrary orientation to the holes in the breadboard. This gives you more flexibility for mounting components than the breadboard does by itself. If you must work without a standard breadboard, you can make the same adjustments on any flat surface when mounting the Universal Baseplate. In this way, you can use this Universal Baseplate without a regular breadboard to provide some quarter-20 tapped holes in various orientations.
This simple but clever design allows an experimenter to move a mounted component around in rotation and (some) translation relative to other components. This freedom of movement can be useful in situations where you might not have established a rigorous spatial design for the equipment you are using, and you are thus searching for the optimal arrangement. It saves a lot of time.
You might wonder why this plate has outside dimensions of 2.56″ by 2.56″. That is part of a clever design. The outside dimensions of this plate are actually 65 mm x 65 mm. This makes the UP-1A Universal Baseplate compatible with the Newport Goniometric stages and their Pitch and Yaw stages, and other devices which also have a 65 mm outside dimension.
Some photos of this Baseplate will be provided in the next post.
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Optics Lab Tips and Tricks 