Bad HandiBot base

I'd really like to figure out how to make a decent jig for clamping framing lumber consistently and square under this device. With that there would be a lot of great experiments to do in joinery. Such a jig exists in the demos that sold the machine to many of us. For some reason ShopBot won't share that with us, so we're on our own.

As such I'm sharing my first failed experiment.



I whipped this up last weekend but didn't have a chance to try it until today. It's a nonstarter. When I adjusted it over a 2x4 I had realized I'd lost so much Z I wouldn't be able to cut through.



For the built in clamps the idea was t-nuts on the side with threaded rods to tighten up blocks against the stock. It was really annoying to tighten (quick release would be much better). But also you couldn't really tighten the blocks well, they wanted to spin when the rod was fully in the t-nut on them. So they already had to be in position before tightening the rods into them. When they did press and get tight you could pop the t-nut on the clamp block out. Another issue I hadn't considered was keeping the clamped object square to the base. That would have been very hard with this design. Yes, that was part of the goal but I also threw this together to just try it before investing much time in it. Good thing since it didn't work out at all.

I like the idea of adjustable height bench cookie feet, I may revisit that. I think the next jig will be a simple bed with t-track in it to use in clamping things down.

Hi Marc,

I like what you've come up with there. We are working on finalizing a lumber clamping jig; the jigs we showed in our earlier videos were all proof of concept. We fully expect that the jigs we release will be improved upon/ remixed by the Handibot community, but we wanted to think them through fully before making these open designs public.

As for your design, if the joint you are hoping to cut allows, we've had good luck cutting lumber with the broad face in contact with the table, as opposed to on end as you are showing here. The goal generally is to get the top face of your board on the same plane as the bottom of the base. Let me know if I can help in any way.

Best,
David

Thanks.

Yeah, agreed on routing the face. I had it on edge in the picture checking how high I could get it. I have a project in mind for 4x4 lumber I didn't have on hand. I think I'm wrong about the base being to thick as well. What I forgot was I can raise the pieces back up higher using the backer board. So I think I'll try this again, but incorporate the backer board as part of this including some registration with the HandiBot base.

I seem to recall one of the demos where there was a board on top of the lumber being milled. It had a hole in it where the cut was going to be made, presumably so you could quickly align the lumber into the correct spot where you wanted the cut and then clamp it down. Am I correct in that? If so how did that work in practice? Seems potentially really useful for repetitive cuts.

Yes, we had a number of jigs we were testing during the filming, one of which was a board with sliding fences to help align lumber for repetitive cuts. We are hopefully posting files today of a simplified version of this that uses the indexing holes in the Handibot base for attachment. We have had good luck with this latest jig.

Looking forward to it. Ran to check git, but guess I'll have to wait a little longer. :-)