Mostly my mill has been used for engraving, although I've used it to shape a
few custom pieces. Recently I ran into a problem though. I starting
cutting some stencils with it. I found milling off a block of wood flat,
and then securing my sheet to that worked fairly well, but when working with
metal I've had a hard time figuring out how to secure the pieces I want to
remove. They tend to shift, bind the cutter, and it goes SNAP. On light
stuff or small jobs I can sit there and watch for it to get close to going
through and then take a couple tungsten scribes and use them to hold the
waste piece down until the cutter is done and clear. Still it seems like
there should be a better way to do that. On a detailed stencil or a piece
of aluminum sheet I can find myself standing there for quite a while. I had
considered pocketing the entire waste piece, but that would really increase
the time to do a job. Also, Lazy Cam really throws in a lot of strange
artifacts that need to be manually edited out before you can get a final
piece. Not horrible if you are doing twenty of something, but the time to
get a good piece can be pretty horrible when doing just one of something.

My latest project is to try and make some commemorative coins for a local
event among friends, and pocketing out the entire coin is obviously not the
best option. LOL. I have pretty much decided to finish one surface of the
coin, cut it out, and then drop it into a pocket in my wood block to do the
other side. My problem seems to be in finding a way to cut it out without
having it slide and bind as soon as it starts to come loose from the stock.