I had several projects ruined due to the carpet tape not being strong enough to hold the wood on the table especially towards the end of a job so i came up with a quick hack that should work.
It is currently attached to a wooden board that is taped to the wasteboard (i will screw the brackets right in to the waste board if this solution works well). I attached a picture that explains it better.
By using 2 brackets on each side and screws with 2 nuts each as set screws, it should hold the wood in place. Of course this will not work if you try to carve away most of the sides of the wood, but i do mostly carvings that leave the rim as a frame anyways so it should work fine for me.
you may still get some wiggle depending on how strong those brackets area and how fast you’re trying to move through the wood, but it looks like a good idea in-progress there!
Yeah i actually gave it a try yesterday and while the wood didnt move at all, the nuts wiggled loose so it might need a different solution still. Not bad, but also not great
I would suggest you get some really long screws and large washers and clamp the wood by screwing into your platform board from the top directly adjacent to your stock, so the washer is clamping it. Alternatively, you might want to try nylock nuts for the screws if you want to continue having them come in from the side, and potentially put some kind of “foot” between the bottom of the bolt and the stock to better clamp it without digging in as badly.
Also, for cases where you want to have an object fully cut out at the end, you’ll probably still have to leave some supports (using MeshCAM’s features or modeling your own…) or you can screw-down your stock from the back-side through the mounting board you have there. Two screws up into the stock from behind should go a long way to helping hold everything steady, combined with vertical clamping holding the stock down at the edges.
You want to avoid clamping laterally from the ends like that in situations where you might cut enough material away that it would start to flex/fail under the clamping pressure, like with @oliverblum’s butterfly design.
Of course this will not work if you try to carve away most of the sides of the wood, but i do mostly carvings that leave the rim as a frame anyways so it should work fine for me.
