I would like to cut some stencils out of .015" aluminum, could I stack like 10 of them up clamp them down and do multiple at once? thanks.
Technically you could do that. If you have your feeds & speeds correct to the point where the aluminum is not heating up, you can use superglue to glue the aluminum together to prevent any lifting for thin, flat pieces. Heating the aluminum up afterward will cause the superglue to release and then you can clean off any excess.
That’s pretty thin aluminum though, so it might be a little tricky…
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Brandon Parker
I mean you’d need to consider small offcuts coming out and jamming up the machine… like if your doing nothing but drill holes and pockets you’d be fine, but if you’re cutting pieces, you’d need something like tabs to hold then in place.
How would tabs be applied to the seperate layers?
Set the height of the tabs to be the full thickness of the stock.
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Brandon Parker
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That wouldn’t apply them to seperate layers, that would apply them to all layers,. . I guess its thin enough maybe they could be sliced afterwards with a blade… so maybe leaving a portion uncut might be fine
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking…
If you get the feeds/speeds correct, tabs would not be needed as superglue is very efficient at sticking very flat and smooth aluminum pieces together until they are heated up.
Or, one could carve multiples at a time with just a single layer and multiple pieces across the surface. One would do this by first creating a smooth flat surface with pockets for each piece of aluminum so that the surface of the aluminum would be flush with the top of the jig. Then you would machine a top cap that would go over the entire thing and compress around the edge of each aluminum piece. The tape & superglue method would be used on the backs of each aluminum piece to prevent lifting as well. Safety heights would need to be considered as would how to zero, but this is nothing that is too difficult. To be honest, this is how I would probably do it…
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Brandon Parker
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What is the tape and superglue method? Thanks.
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Basically making your own double sided tape
Place a layer of low tack blue printers tape to 2 seperare surfaces, and the glue used in between… the tape makes a mess free removal and the hold down strength of super glue.
You can see in this puzzle clip how well it holds and how easy it is to remove at the end (I usually use a putty knife or chisel to pry up one corner to get the workpiece up, but was able to pry these small parts by hand…)
Just a simple no clamp hold down method 
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