Some more lessons learned from a few hours of cutting this morning.....

My tabs are really a combined onion skin and tab of .02" which worked great.... most of the time. The plywood is 3/4" prefinished maple and not what I would call stellar quality so some it is warped "a bit". If the area where I'm cutting the small parts is warped at all and not absolutely flat to the table it ends up trashing the parts because the dust brush pushes them into the bit. I'm going to up the thickness and see how the rest of the day goes but out of around 10 runs I've lost 2 sets of the parts which is more than double what I lost in over a 1000 runs before Trying to look on the bright side with the tabs.... it is overall quicker because I just lift the whole piece off the table and set it aside instead of picking each one out. Then after I get the next run going I pop them out while the cnc is running so overall at the end of the day it is faster with the tabs.

Canman77.... I got started on this because a friend gave me a small vacuum pump. It was one that required a lot of air to be moving to cool it down so a good seal meant it was overheating in no time. Without a good seal it didn't generate enough force to hold much. Worked fine but only for a minute or two at a time. Found out my shopvac worked the best of anything I had and used it for a little while. Really is amazing how much force they generate. Then when I got the large order in it justified the upgrade to 4 of the good ones and a dedicated box for them. Good luck on your testing and I think you will be happy with the results. If the mdf and a shopvac works for your test then ldf and a shopbot vacuum motor should be the ticket.