Hackaday: Simple clamps are great if you need to keep the pressure on two parallel surfaces, but if you have an irregular plane, or you need to cut through it, clamps are not the correct tool. The folks at [NYC CNC] feature a video with a clever hack borrowing from other disciplines. Painters tape is applied to the top of a level mounting surface in the machine and then burnished. The same is done to the bottom of the workpiece. Superglue is drizzled between the tape layers and pressed together so now the stock is held firmly below the toolhead.
3 comments:
This is quite interesting, as I have seen this type of fixturing for metal work before. I watch a youtube channel called Clickspring, who makes incredibly ornate and complicated timepieces in his home shop. The majority of the metal he works with is brass or aluminum, so I'm not quite sure whether the technique wold hold up on steel. His method is to use superglue to adhere the workpiece to your bench, then torch your workpiece lightly to melt the glue and free your piece. His method has a distinct advantage over clamping or putting things in a vice, because it leaves all areas of your workpiece open. A caveat, however, is that when you're done machining, or whatever operation you were doing, your piece is stuck to the workbench! In the article above, they use masking tape to fix this problem, but it only work so well. Another caveat for this method is that you already need a machined surface to stick to the bottom of your part.
“Painters tape is applied to the top of a level mounting surface in the machine and then burnished. The same is done to the bottom of the workpiece. Superglue is drizzled between the tape layers and pressed together so now the stock is held firmly below the toolhead“ this is indeed a very interesting hack to try and get a “clamp free” surface for CNC. That said I would be fairly skeptical of whether or not this setup could withstand a CNC table of larger sizes going at higher speeds. Also the article suggests that the main reason that this can be done is due to the fact that metal be a realatively nonpouous substance should let the super glue adhere. But I’m doubtful that this would work if you resurfaced your CNC table like we have with the MDF. This is definitely something that I may try if we didn’t already use raptor nails.
The enthusiasm this the guy in this video has makes me so glad. Imagine having so much passion above CNC adhesives. I do agree with him though that this adhesive is pretty great. Especially since you can buy painters tape and super glue yourself, there is not an over priced adhesive strip that uses the exact same ingredients. We should look at doing stuff like this when we are cutting small pieces of plastic on the CNC that we can not wiggle clamps around and have the material be cut safely. I am a little leery though as to how well the painters tape and super glue works on certain materials. Especially whether or not you have to score the surface before applying the tape. If you do not have to score the material than I think this may be a viable option for us to adhere to our CNC materials to the table with. We should look into this.
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