"Stuart Wheaton" wrote in message
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

I like the vacuum table idea. How much would it take to
work? Would, say,
a hand operated brake bleeder pump be enough? Might be if
only one item
was being held?
phil