Hi guys,
I don't know if this will be helpful to you or not, but I cut a lot of small stuff and had to figure out a way to hold them. This is a cheap setup but works great for me.
The vacuum pump is a small Gast unit that came from the surpluscenter.com and I already had the air tank. The fixtures are made from two pieces of 3/4" or 1" plastic. The bottom piece of plastic gets grooved for air flow, and one end is drilled and tapped for a 1/4" air fitting.
In the top piece of plastic I routed shallow pockets slightly smaller than the parts, and drilled holes through the pockets into the air grooves of the bottom piece. There's a layer of Allstar Adhesives 1/32" adhesive backed spoilboard gasket between the two layers and also on the top, and I just poked holes through the top gasket inside of the pockets.
The material in the pictures is 1/4" thick Dymondwood.
This obviously isn't a replacement for a high CFM whole table system, but for small stuff like this it probably works better, and these fixtures can be made for almost any shaped part.
I can go into more detail on the construction if anyone is interested.
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