Material handling is the primary activity of every manufacturing organization. It has been estimated that at least 15 to 25% of the cost of the product is attributable to material handling activities. Unlike many other operations, material handling adds to the cost of the product and not to its value. It is therefore important first to eliminate or at least minimize the need for material handling and second to minimize the cost of handling. In case of machine tools like lathe or vertical machining centres it is desired to handle heavy jobs, which is conventionally done manually using chain blocks. This method is time consuming, unsafe and takes a lot of labour time adding to unproductive time of machine. Thus there is a need of a modified work handling device in the form of jaw capable to handle heavy pipes as well as plates with equal efficiency. This paper describes an efficient mechanism for clamping & de-clamping of work piece with zero slip.

Keywords : Gripper, Zero slip, Worm, Self-locking.