Work holding and tooling are like 90% of doing well in a machine shop, and maybe 60% in a wood shop.

I first started with laser cutters in 2009 at TechShop, and that was before I knew about work holding and tooling.

Then I got to live on a property with a full machine shop, and my journey towards being less ignorant began! And then a few years ago I got a small CNC router. It needed a bit of help, and that was awesome.

My son in law has more than once asked me questions of the form 'do you want to use a CNC router, or do you want to make a CNC router?'

And it is true, I am often more intriqued by the process of creating tools than of using them. And my first inclination with any tool is to make some variant of an erector set.

I had a good time making the CNC work, and getting the controller to work, and using the Universal G Code Sender, calibrating the controller, and adding T-tracks and then cool Aluminum T-Track hold down clamps.

And I 3d printed parts for an improved stepper motor mount, and I printed a lot of links of cable tray.

One day at Chimera they suddenly had a little jar of 3d printed laser cutter 'clamps.' A little 'T' sort of shape that was designed to squish into the honeycomb cutting board and hold down the material. They look like these clipsfrom engraveandcutfiles.com (I've never used that site, just found it when I looked for '3d printed laser cutter hold downs.'

I cut drawer dividers, and I got them the wrong size.

And so I 'drew' a line of an appropriate width, and did some fiddling to get the laser in the right spot, and tried to just cut a strip off of my previously cut parts.

And that is your first bit of foreshadowing! In theory one shoud be able to work on parts, and then reposition things, and by being clever or using registration marks, or magic, do a second laser operation on the parts.

Like to cut a freaking strip off of a piece.

But no. If this was metal I might say that there was stress in the part when it cooled, and so cutting it released the stress. Maybe acrylic works through a similar mechanism. But it was as though the laser was a wedge pushing the material apart as it cut.

Which unleashed my imagination as I thought about how to hold the piece. I thought about weights and various clamping schemes. And I remembered my T-Slots and clamps. And I attached the T-Slot to the cutting bed with toggle bolts (which I learned were called Molly bolts).

And it worked!

And then I had the next thought of 'how do I align my parts, and I tried using binder clips.

These don't have much hold, but they worked fine as long as I was careful.

But really, if you have Can't twist clamps you want to use them on everything.