{"id":311,"date":"2012-10-22T14:06:42","date_gmt":"2012-10-22T13:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/?p=311"},"modified":"2012-10-22T14:06:42","modified_gmt":"2012-10-22T13:06:42","slug":"clamping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/2012\/10\/22\/clamping\/","title":{"rendered":"Clamping&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Up until now I&#8217;d been using scrap bits of metal to act as clamps, holding my PCBs down to be milled:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"mill 043\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/mill-068.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Not exactly convenient. I needed a better way to fix workpieces down for the mill to work on, but you never know what sized bits you&#8217;re going to be dealing with in future, so I thought I&#8217;d make a perforated work bed. I bought a chunk of white acetal (an engineering plastic) and stuck a bit of graph paper to it, then used it as a guide to drill holes at regular intervals.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"mill 043\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/mill-073.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I used a countersink bit to take the sharp edges off the holes, then used an M5 tap to thread them all.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"mill 043\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/mill-075.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Finally, I designed some little clamps and cut them out of black acetal.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"mill 043\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/mill-082.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Using them I can easily clamp down just about any size of PCB to the bed for the mill to work on, plus it&#8217;s much easier to clamp other flat things down too. Here&#8217;s a bit of clear acrylic being worked on:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"mill 043\" src=\"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/mill-083.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Total cost: just under \u00a310 for the plastic plus a handful of M5 bolts. Nice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Up until now I&#8217;d been using scrap bits of metal to act as clamps, holding my PCBs down to be milled: Not exactly convenient. I needed a better way to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-311","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/howiem.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}