I attempted to carve a fidget spinner from expanded PVC. It worked great with all of the cuts, but when it carved through the plastic on the outline, the now loose center piece (fidget spinner), caught on the bit and the piece ended up ruined. Should I leave a small connection, and cut/file away after removing the board, or is there some type of clamping procedure that I am missing?
Thanks, BobJewell. Is there a way to insert tabs in the Easel software?
in the project select the part that you want tabs on then once highlighted you can check the use tabs box
then choose how many tabs you want,
then click on each tab and hold while moving the mouse and place them where you want them.
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also here is the official link to support for tabs
https://inventables.desk.com/customer/en/portal/articles/2402655-walkthrough-tutorial-adding-and-removing-tabs?b_id=9566
there are a lot of other good things to know in these tutorials.
You can also use double sided tape if you don’t want to use tabs. When I make inlays, the material is 1/16" thick and my inlay part is usually fonts. The problem I’ve found in Easel with fonts and tabs is, most of the time, because Easel automatically generates tabs, some of the type characters have two many tabs and others have none. What works best for me is to turn tabs off and use double sided tape between the waste board and material when cutting through the material. As an extra precaution, you can also clamp your material around the outside. One thing I learned the hard way was, when using double sided tape to hold thin material, be sure to apply it under the entire inlay piece. This is especially important when using an up-cut bit. The up-cut bit is always pulling up on the work piece and if there is missing tape under a letter the bit will pull the work piece right off the waste board. Hope this helps.