Bob La Londe wrote:
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.


You might try making the base plate into a vacuum table, cutting and
drilling a vacuum manifold under the parts to hold them down. Or glue
them to a substrate with a glue that can later be cut or heated, or
dissolved away. Wood turners often glue a thin piece of paper between
the material they are turning and a faceplate, then split the paper when
they are done to free the work.

Stuart