How do I clamp CNC material with little to no border?

[gamemaker]

I want to mill a design into a block that will have little or no boundary around the design.

My previous CNC machine had clamps that held along the bottom, the SM holds from above.

Has anyone found a good way to clamp lower down a block to keep it from interfering with the tool? I suspect I’ll have to jury-rig a horizontal clamp on the sides of the material, then clamp THAT to the bed somehow…

[StumbleRunner]

I’ve done a couple runs where I got the clamps to hold on the very edge of the corner of the material and in one case where I did the run in two phases, clamping on just one side and then moving the clamps to the other side. It kind of worked, but if someone has a suggestion for holding down from the sides or bottom, I’d also really love to hear about about it.

[xchrisd]

There is a thread from @jepho about some clamping systems. I can’t find it right now but I guess he will show it to you, or you do a bit of searching in his threads.

[clewis]

As @xchrisd mentioned, @jepho has several good posts about it.

Do I need to use a jig?

What is a the purpose of a jig and should I have one with my new Snapmaker machine. I intend to look briefly at what a jig does and then illustrate this short article with one that I made earlier and then discuss it in the light of the newly modified jig that I made. A jig is a device for ensuring the precision of a piece of work where one operation has to be repeated many times. This improves the accuracy of production numbers as they roll off the production line and a jig is usually removable…

Started making my flat clamp jig for cube carving

Possibly. I have no idea how to print 3D since I have not had my SM1 machine very long and I have not yet come to understand the 3D printing process. I have used the laser and the CNC aspect of the machine. The failure in the block etching was not understanding why the wood created an issue for me. My solution was not to waste the 1200 blocks of spruce but to find another way to process them. My flat clamp jig is that method. It can do with a few tweaks but it is now complete and working. I wi…

Modifying the SM1 Table and its Clamp System

I have now completed the bed and clamp modifications for my SM1. My original feeling was that it was sometimes quite awkward to hold items to the bed when trying to use the CNC milling functions for SM1. One limitation that I ran into very quickly was the 90mm square workpiece limitation. I assumed that this was partly due to the travel of the head and the length of the clamps that were supplied with SM1. The illustration which follows shows the clamps which were quite long and quite soft and th…

There are some other goods posts too. I’m considering the low rise clamps in

CNC plate: More holes?

So, it looks like I’ll be using the CNC head a lot, but the problem I’m running into is that there aren’t enough holes in enough places to securely clamp the wide variety of blanks I want to cut. Does anyone know of an alternative build plate that has far more holes for screwing the clamping screws to? At the moment, I don’t have the ability to drill and tap new holes myself, so there’s nothing I do custom right now…

[jepho]

Thanks @xchrisd. Happy to oblige. There you go.

Modifying the SM1 Table and its Clamp System

I have now completed the bed and clamp modifications for my SM1. My original feeling was that it was sometimes quite awkward to hold items to the bed when trying to use the CNC milling functions for SM1. One limitation that I ran into very quickly was the 90mm square workpiece limitation. I assumed that this was partly due to the travel of the head and the length of the clamps that were supplied with SM1. The illustration which follows shows the clamps which were quite long and quite soft and th…

Started making my flat clamp jig for cube carving

I was using the laser to etch 40mm cubes with the letters of the alphabet and everything was fine. I bulk ordered some cubes and was surprised to find that the laser worked well but could not make any impression on the wood where the hard annular ring wood was. The mock-up image shows an example of the end grain that was causing the laser not to burn the wood. The darker wood is the hard compressed ring of the tree. This was disappointing because I did not want to have edge burn or smoke stainin…

https://forum.snapmaker.com/t/a-disaster-in-the-making/

[sdj544]

There are some cam lock jigs some people have made and used like this:

X-Carve PCB Cam Clamp by chemist4higher

Haven’t gotten around to making one personally.
I’ve managed to get by with holding onto the very edge and corners as StumbleRunner did. I use either some scrap plywood ‘fingers’ I cut or some ones I printed out of PETG and PLA. That way if (when) the bit runs into them, it just cuts through them and doesn’t break.

I’ve also had pretty good success doing one end then the other. There is a noticeable tooling pattern at the intersection point, but nothing that I wasn’t planning on sanding out anyway.

Other people have had success with:
double sided tape

blue tape on both the work piece and the spoil board and then super glue together

hot glue gun around the base
-S

[StumbleRunner]

Oh, I like that cam clamp idea… might need to try and make a modified version of that so that I can still anchor the material when it runs really close to the edge of bed.

[gamemaker]

Yeah, exactly - I think that cam clamp is in my future…if I can get the 3D printer module to behave.

Thanks all - for links, and for the excellent previous contributions!

I got it to work by just shrinking the design and holding on to the edges with two clamps, but I expect to be doing enough small or borderless stuff that I’ll definitely be figuring out a more permanent solution.

[sdj544]

You can also use plywood and cnc to make cam clamps.

-S