Machining Small Parts on a CNC Vacuum Table

Quick tip: to maintain vacuum, onion-skin and cut out the smallest parts first. November 25, 2005

Question
How small are the parts you are getting on a flat table router? I have a 4m flat table with two 250 vacuum pumps, using MDF as the sacrificial board. We are cutting drawer sides and seem to be getting part sliding on the smaller drawers (30cm X 10cm). The material is double sided 15mm melamine on a chipboard core. What size is your cutter and associated feeds?

Forum Responses
(CNC Forum)
From contributor D:
We rout out pieces down to about 150mm x 100mm. We also do carcass rails at 60mm wide by varying lengths. Machine sounds similar to yours. We use CadCode to produce the machine code. We set up CadCode to onion-skin the small parts. It routs these small parts first, leaving a thin layer on, then when all the small parts are routed, it comes back and cleans out the onion-skin, while the vacuum is best. Then the rest of the nest is routed out. We have almost no movement of any parts. Use onion-skinning, not tabbing.