Milling and fixturing irregularly shaped ABS enclosures

[dermeister545]

Hello, I'm an electrical engineer by trade and am fairly new to CNC milling. I'm looking to purchase a CNC router, mainly for milling cutouts into ABS enclosures (see example attached), but also possibly some light aluminum work. At the top of my list right now is a 2x2' Avid CNC Benchtop Pro machine, with a Centroid Acorn controller, Clearpath servos, and a 24k 240V spindle (still deciding which one exactly). The primary use of this setup will be prototyping and possibly small production runs. The questions I still have mainly relate to workpiece fixturing and alignment, any insights to these would be greatly appreciated!

1. What is the easiest way to fixture irregularly shaped enclosures like the one in the attached images? I'm thinking of milling a jig out of wood (e.g. grooves in a spoilboard that the enclosure can be inserted into) to clamp down the enclosures, but I've also seen enclosures simply be clamped into vises like this , which I think may be problematic for non-rectangular ones.

2. If the enclosures are held in vises, how do you align them to the CNC's coordinate system? I've seen Centroid has a probing system for workpiece alignment, however that only seems to work for registering to regularly shaped features like slots and bosses. Would it be possible to have the probing system probe the outline of an irregular shaped enclosure and then align it to the CAD model's coordinate system?

Are there any books or guides that address these issues? Sorry if these are newbie questions, I can't seem to find much information on this.

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