Abstract Heat exchangers in new nuclear power generation plants are made of thin AISI 316L stainless-steel plates stacked together in order to improve their efficiency and compactness. To ensure the assembly, the global distortion of those plates must be mastered and minimized, mainly by predicting the evolution of the residual stress field during their manufacturing process chain. During machining, those residual stresses are redistributed to reach another equilibrium state, leading to a macroscopic part distortion. The main objective of this work is to study experimentally the influence of the machining toolpath and clamping strategies on the global part distortion. Then, a part distortion model is developed in order to verify the clamping effect on the distortion.