The Makera Z1 Will Have an Available Vacuum Table

I recently wrote about the Kickstarter campaign for the Makera Z1 desktop CNC mill. That has already raised more that $7M and is still going. But Makera just released a new video showing that there will be a vacuum table available for the Z1 and I have to talk about it.

When milling something, you have to have some way to hold that thing in place. There is often a lot of force involved, so the workholding needs to be very secure. The most common workholding solutions are vises and clamps, which are what most Makera users will use. But there are other solutions and a vacuum table is one of them.

A vacuum table is a special kind of bed that the work material rests on. It has air channels and holes or slots. When you connect a vacuum, like Makera’s Cyclone dust collector, you create a pressure differential between the bottom of the work material and the top. The higher atmospheric pressure on the top pushes the work material down onto the table and friction keeps it from moving side to side. It is a bit like holding a piece of cardboard up to the hose on your vacuum cleaner.

While vacuum tables aren’t usually the strongest workholding solution available, they can be very convenient. That’s especially true when you want to mill the entire top of the work material — a situation in which clamps, or potentially even a vise, would get in the way.

Makera’s video doesn’t give us much information about the vacuum table. It isn’t even entirely clear if it is something users will make themselves (potentially with a kit) or if it will be available as a complete unit. The video description says “You can buy the vacuum bed now on [Kickstarter],” but the Kickstarter campaign page doesn’t show it as an add-on.

All we know for sure right now is that there will be some vacuum table option for the Z1 and it will work with the Makera Cyclone dust collector.