Hello,@pchild and I have been working for the past few weeks on improving our OMIO X8 capabilities. We’ve developed and built a new spoil board design, as well as a modular jig system. Currently we have two jigs, one for bumper joints, and one for our tube vices. These are largely made out of 3/4" MDF.
Spoil Board
The spoil board is fairly simple, with 12 counterbore mounting holes. It features a 3x4 grid of .25" holes we use to mount our jig systems with. We designed the board to maximize the usable area, which includes adding .5" of X space on each side of the table.
We used the hardware we had on hand to mount the board. 1/4-20 hex drive flat head screws, and 80/20 3382 Slide-in Economy T-Nuts work perfectly in the existing table slots on the Omio.
Vice Jig
We have four of these vices we got with one of our Omios (unsure of exact source) which we have perpetually fought with mounting, tramming, and having to remove when we needed more space on one machine.
Our original fixturing for these was two pieces of 1x1 90deg steel with 1/4-20 bolts used to clamp to the table T slots and bolts threaded into the holes on the side of the vice. I don’t have a picture of the original setup, and can’t seem to find my original drawings for these parts, but they’re very straight forward. You can get an idea of the mounts in this picture. I’ll take more next time I’m back in the shop.
The main driver of this project was to create a platform to rapidly and repeatedly setup these vices for holding tubes and other small objects, as well as allow us to quickly move between our two Omio’s. Our first jig retains the old vice fixturing and moves it on to a jig plate, with the bolts threading into tee nut inserts on the bottom of the jig. The jig plate is located with that .25" hole pattern, where we use .25" spring pins to align between the jigs and spoil board. The weight of the vices holds the whole setup down. The jig is flipped 180deg in these pictures as we were testing various fits. As both patterns were cut on the machine in the same orientation, the vices are naturally aligned quite well, and we also have some minor space to do a final tram along the Y axis.
Bumper Jig
For the last few years we have been constructing our bumpers using finger joints in the corners to increase rigidity. We have been cutting these on the Omio, however with a poor setup that usually took a bit of effort to get right. This new modular system allowed us to create a simple and easy to use fixture. In addition, by creating a known reference point on the fixture, we can reduce the complexity by creating a single g-code file that anyone can run with minimal training.
We used horizontal toggle clamps from Harbor Freight to secure the board to the fixture. The fixture uses the same .25" spring pins to locate on the spoil board.
This project is very much a work in progress, and we still have a ways to go. Future improvements include:
- Replacing the toggle clamp feet, they are a bit too soft as is.
- Find a suitable fly cutter and build a process for decking the spoil board. Given a properly sized fly cutter, we should be able to reach the entire board.
- Possibly replacing the vices with a different solution, likely similar to 1086 or WCP’s tube fixtures.
A table saw was used to cut the sheet of MDF to size for the spoil board and jigs. All of the MDF routing was done on the Omio with a single flute 4mm up cut bit.
OnShape Document with the various designs is here. Preston has the various cam files, however as this has been a pretty iterative process with a bit of trial and error, they are far from perfect.
Edit: Forgot to add, the dust shoe we designed for both machines is here. It can be entirely 3d printed, and uses magnets to hold the lower section on, making it quickly removable for tool changes. The brush bristles are from one of these and work really well.