Noah B Woodworks

Seems like a good title for a woodworking blog page. “The Spoil Board”. Anyway I am currently working to increase the efficiency of my CNC. I flattened it yesterday for the first time since I got the machine. It had a mosaic of past carves outlined into it. I’m working to make a spoil board that is easily repeatable out of a 2′ by 2′ sheet of MDF with work holding built in. This spoil board will go on top of my current spoil board, meaning I’ll most likely never have to flatten the bigger surface ever again. I rarely cut objects bigger than 20 inches, so when I need to do that, I’ll remove the new spoil board. For small, quick, and repeatable projects I am opting for a cam system.

I’ve placed holes in 25 locations on the MDF in a grid spaced 3 inches apart and offset from the left and bottom sides of the spoil board to make room for a fence. These holes have T-nuts at the bottom, and serve as mounting nuts for the cam clamps. Once these holes have been cut, I can flip the spoil board over and cut a recess for the fence, and the mounting holes that go through the original spoil board table. Cutting a recess for the fence with the same zero as the mounting holes squares the spoil board to the CNC meaning that placing work on the table will be automatic.

Once the fence is in place, I can run another toolpath that creates a pocket in the corner of the fence for my XYZ zeroing probe plate. This plate overhangs the bottom most corner of the workpiece and is a very accurate method for obtaining zero. I have to make a slight adjustment to the way I draw, though. I’ve used the center of the workpiece as zero previously, now I need to use the bottom left corner. Then I can make the cam clamps out of some spare plywood. I’ll probably make 4, with differing sizes. 3 inches of space between bolts is a lot, and I am anticipating using milled pieces of scrap wood to fill in the gaps if the space between cam clamp and workpiece is too great. Hopefully this works in my attempt to keep these cost effective.