Waste Board Improvement

This is coming to a waste board near me very soon!

MATCHFIT Dovetail Hardware Variety Pack

Cheers,
Craig

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Interesting and looks good. Let us know how it goes!

Good luck with this and thanks for sharing. I have and like MicroJig and have several of their tools. For this application, you’ll need a certain dovetail bit (which they also sell). It would also seem that for this idea to be the most versatile, you would have to cut a lot of “slots” close together. I’m a woodworker also and cutting these parallel slots could be somewhat of a challenge. But, there are videos out there.

What I did was to buy “t-slot” aluminum channels from E-Bay. Then, I cut “spacers” from MDF about 2 3/4 inches wide. See picture. But, I really am not using this! It just seems too hard to successfully clamp and apply “downward” and “lateral” pressure to the blank at the same time to hold it.

What I generally do now is to screw a piece of 3/4 MDF on top of the t-slots (which are screwed to the stock X-Carve wasteboard). With the sacrificial piece of MDF, I can either replace it or fill the holes with wood filler and sand.

In addition, if I’m doing a number of “like” carves, I take the time to add screw inserts, usually 1/4-20, to the MDF. Then, when I design the item to be carved, like a coaster, I just make the blank oversize and come in 1/2 to 3/4 inch on each corner and drill 1/4-20 clearance holes. With a CNC program (I use VCarve), it’s easy to drill the holes in the MDF the correct size for the inserts without going to the drill press. I don’t usually use a screw in the lower left corner since that’s my 0,0,0. If the piece is “warped”, I add the screw and just change my short Z axis cal macro to move off the corner to the right enough to use Charley’s calibration block. I never cal in X or Y since I set the X and Y limit switches to the approximate corner for homing. This works for me

Amazing! Looks truly versatile. I may steal some of your ideas :smile:

If you decide to use the MicroJig method, I’m assuming you’ll use MDF. Reason is that after installation on the CNC, you’ll have to “surface plane” to ensure a level bed. Plywood wouldn’t surface very well.

I’ve found that clamping has been almost as big of a challenge as the CNC itself. I had made some clamps with my 3D printer. Some, I’ve discarded. Others, like for clamping thin material, like 1/8th inch Baltic birch, worked well. My challenge now is to clamp “round” blanks. I had made and cut out some coasters but the lettering didn’t paint well. So, I’m trying to “re-purpose”. Success in life is wonderful, but, even in failure, lessons are learned.

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