Made some large flat clamps for my X-carve I am hoping these will work out good
they are made out of red oak and took at 3hrs for the pair
here is the easel project for anyone that is interested
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@RobertCanning
oh yeah did you keep the original wasteboard holes and just put the t-track in the middle?
Nice! I like the thicker shoulder against the workpiece. I might use this idea. I’m not terribly happy with my clamping situation at the moment.
Jason
Pure speculation on my part, but with enough projects under your belt, you may discover how easy it is to screw your work down to a sacrificial wasteboard. It takes about a second, and you will never worry about damaging that Inventables wasteboard again. Plus, you can level your spoilboard to make it flat to your machine. AND you wont have to worry about snapping bits. Time is such a precious commodity and we are actually fortunate not to have to worry about damaging an expensive a t-slot bed. MDF is pretty cheap. Keep a box of drywall screws next to the machine and BAM. Work secured.
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I was using the drywall screws as well, but I kept pulling the mdf up and making my bed have big raised spots in it. I re-leved a couple times, but decided to try a different route.
I haven’t come up with anything better, might go back to that method.
Jason
I’ve been thinking about cutting a grid of 75mm holes in a piece of 1/8" hardboard. It could be placed on top of the workpiece to show where you can drill holes to run M5 bolts through to the threaded inserts. Same as the drywall screw idea, but less damage to the wasteboard.
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That’s a good point - I just use a putty knife periodically to scrape those level. Most of my projects involve cutting out objects and it saves a lot of time if you can confidently cut all the way through your work piece into the wasteboard. Also, using “ramped” tabs makes it easy to remove the piece and facilitates filing or sanding away the tabs.
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I use the clamp method, made a bunch of clamps like the inventables ones and I keep a stack of 1/8th hardboard next to the machine so whenever I need to cut through, I put a piece of hardboard under the piece and clamp the whole thing down.
For thin material I always use screws into a sacrificial wasteboard on top of my wasteboard. Keeps me from destroying the top and needing to level all of the time.
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How are you making ramped tabs? That would be a good solution for some of the aluminum parts I have made.
Jason
V-carve and Aspire will do “3D tabs” which makes a nice angled tab.
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great idea!
I have found a coarse thread Kreg screw is less apt to pull or raise the MDF waste board when you remove them.
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Oh yeah earwigger I do that quite a bit but as you know every project has its certian need check out my projects on the inventables website under edalton I have templates and everything for doing that works great for some projects
I will definitely try this. I bet the screws last longer too with the square drive head. Thanks for the tip!
Hey robert here are 2 projects that i made that I think will help with what you are talking about
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Here is my selection of temerperd hardboard spoil boards that i use to cut many different projects it works really well and you dont have to worry about cutting into the Inventables wasteboard
@RobertCanning
oh oh oh yeah I think that the easel generated tool paths are very inefficient
I really think that when you do this sort of cutting in easel it just gets confused I would defiantly use a different program to create these if i was planning on making a bunch of clamps
Definitely some wonky tool paths for cutting them, but I cut a few of these out tonight because there have been times this design would come in handy…thanks for sharing!
I ended up removing the through cuts for the screws as they appeared to be complicating the tool paths and then adding them back in as a second cut.
How did that improve the tool paths?
Did you cut the base clamp out with a .25 bit for speed?
And what type of material did you use? I make all my clamps out of solid oak for strength but it takes longer to cut I would rwally like to find out what material the inventables clamp set is made out of I actually think its made out of some synthetic wood but am not sure
The tool paths with the through cut in there would cut around the through cut area and then come back on the same pass and cut it out instead of just clearing the whole area. Left (original) vs right (through cut removed).
I cut the first one with the .125 but then switched to a .25 on the second one to speed things up a good bit. Ended up cutting them in about 15-20 minutes a piece.
I made two out of some scrap poplar and two out of some scrap red oak that I had sitting around leftover from other cuts.