i use the pin method for flipping parts, but im always in search for fresh hole areas that don’t interfere with my waste board fasteners.
What are others doing with the shapeoko
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I’d love to see some great ideas here. I don’t do 2-sided machining often, but when I do I usually just set the project up to be on opposite sides of the axis, usually the X axis. As long as you have a common axis that you’ve mirrored your part across (side 1 above the X axis and side 2 below the X axis) and you zero off of the same corner, you will have a perfect flip without any alignment holes.
Typing that out actually gave me a great idea to carve a shallow groove in my wasteboard directly over a row of threaded inserts (left to right groove in my eyes). That groove will be the exact width of some aluminum channel or square bar, or better yet, extrusion! Fasten the aluminum in place and bolt something to it so that it has a reference corner in the same spot on both sides (thing of making a capital T). Because you cut the groove with your machine, hopefully from a known, repeatable location, such as a rapid location as your zero, then you can repeatable set your zero when cutting to be exactly halfway through the width of that groove/aluminum fence. So set up your project to flip over that aluminum fence and then you can do the same flip with your workpiece when carving. Carve one side on one side of the fence, and the other side on the other side of the fence. The only caveat here is that you need one straight edge, preferably a perfectly square corner, of your material to align to the aluminum fence.
I feel like that last paragraph has alot of information and not all of that may show up for someone else the way it just appeared in my head. I will try to make this in the near future and revisit with photos or something.
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Traditionally folks used a wooden dowel (often of ebony or some other tropical hardwood) as a guide for parallelism.
A triangular rule w/ a stop might be a good fir for that sort of thing.
Agree, using the same corner for registration is the best practice for any re-orientation of cutting since using the center doubles any error.