Clamp Foot Plate

[Lee Roberts]

Well for spring I thought about just putting some on the linear rail that supports those units, adjust the spring as needed...job done

[GEOFFREY]

I think a lot of commercial PCB machines use an air operatedn spring loaded "pressure foot", no balls, but a short brush dust shoe which also connects to a vac to remove chips,dust etc. My Wessel machine built in 1985 had this system, but I removed it when converting the machine as I like to see the cutter and work when cutting. Another disadvantage for me was that as I made miniatures, tiny components not tabbed in were likely to disappear into the vac bag!!! G.

[Doddy]

A bit of thread revival, I'll admit. I've been playing in the shed trying to recover my old star mill back into operation (so many tales of woe, but that's water under the bridge now). Fitted with a 2.2kW Chinese water cooled spindle I thought to try a bit of isolation routing. Previously results for me were varied... from terrible to bloody terrible, and I'd written the technology off (I blame the previous 3020 style MD router that I had before). Anyway, this time the results were very encouraging - good enough for one-off prototypes of unexotic components. But, the one area of weakness is always getting the laminate flat on the bed. So, I'm here googling for "pressure feet" and up comes this thread. Has anyone in the last 5 years since this thread died come across an affordable pressure foot for a 80mm dia spindle, or knocked up a diy alternative? Any experience, good or bad of the results on PCB with fine (for routing... maybe 10 thoa) geometries.

[phill05]

Doddy,
In my pre cnc days I had and used a few engraving machines and on one I made a spring loaded nose cone for the spindle that worked very easy if you don't have a large qty' of units to make would be a simple option for you.

Phill