I understand that the most straightforward way of vertical clamping on the 5 Pro is to use the gantry shift and fashion a mount in front of the machine. I’ve seen on some other machines (Stepcraft and Onefinity) that people take out a section of the spoilboard and mount the vertical section inside the normal work area. It seems as though this could work with the 5 Pro, albeit you’re limited to mounting along the Y axis and between two of the baseframe members. Anyone try this? Is there an obvious reason it would fail?
If I understand your question correctly, there’s a feature mentioned on the SP5 webpage, called Gantry Shift for Joinery which should achieve what your are trying to do.
I put a lot of thought into this and could not see why not. However, I decided to just go with the gantry shift for a few reasons: (1) max board width will be the distance between the base extrusions of 15.75" – thought that might be a little limiting; (2) clamping the workpiece will be limited by the width of the extrusion(s) removed – if I only remove one (which was the plan) the opening will only be ~4" (102.6mm) wide. Given I want some support below the workpiece to hold it square, room for clamps, etc. that seemed like the opening would be limiting what I could do (e.g., 4x4 table leg); and (3) accessing the workpiece below the table bed for clamping and squaring would involve me crawling below the table. Sooo … to preserve the ability to tile without undoing the gantry shift, I decided to bite the bullet and surface 3.2" off the back of the wasteboard down to near the aluminium and then do the shift.
I agree I liked what I saw with the hole… seemed simpler, but crawling under the table is what finally got me to decide against it.
I’ve had a hard time finding good videos on vertical clamping on the CNC. There’s a few people on youtube with Avid cncs that have made ok videos, but this one I found from Scienci Labs has some really good information on workflow, and a simple way to build a front clamping setup. It’s a fairly recent video, and there should be more coming in the series.
