Hello, I've got a semi-production project coming up that calls for cutting hundreds of small plywood components, many of them just inches in size, out of 9mm thick baltic birch plywood. The CNC machine I'll be using does have a vacuum hold down table, which I need to be careful not to cut into.

I have kept "onion skin" on the parts in the past, which requires hours of tedious hand sanding. I'd like to avoid that at all costs. I have not tried using tabs yet, and I'm not sure if the CAM software I'll be using (it's quite old: MillRight) has the capability to do that automatically. However, I could make the tabs in the drawing manually.

The shop I'll be working at also has a wide-belt drum sander. For the larger components related to this project, our plan is to keep onion skins and simply flip them once cut, and sand off the top-most 0.5mm or so, which should release them within the plywood sheet. That's not a problem for the larger pieces, but I'm concerned the smaller parts could get tossed around or destroyed in the drum sander.

On a whim, I purchased some Grafix Frisket Film from Amazon, on the off chance that I might be able to tape the underside of these sheets and then run them through the drum sander. Do you think this approach might work? Is there a better tape to use for this kind of application? I noticed there were quite a bit of double-sided tapes for CNC hold-down, but I only need it to be sticky on a single side.

Any other thoughts for cutting these smaller components en masse, and avoiding manual work?

Thanks!

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