When cutting multiple parts from same piece of plywood substrate, what is best way to keep them together/attached but not so they cannot be removed easily when wanting to use them?
Did that make sense to anyone?
I think so, and would point you to what are known as âTabs / Bridgesâ to help hold the pieces in place. Have a look and let us know if we missed what you are after. 
I thought of tabs but under my scenario I would spend more time locating the tabs than it is worth.
Letâs say I have a cut file for parts/pieces to build a model airplane. I may wish to cut the parts from several slabs of ply. After I cut a file instead of having all the pieces fall out onto my laser bed I want them to stay in the slab they were cut from and at the same time be easy for someone to remove without messing up the pieces. I am talking a possibility of hundreds of parts of many shapes and sizes. Marking each part with two tabs is not feasible.
You can select automatic tab generation with two tabs per shape, which seems to work reasonably well for the simple stuff I make.
When the auto placement isnât quite what I want, I just drag the tab around to where it makes more sense.
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Why?
The documentation I shared is really worth review.
LightBurn provides many options for how tabs can be used for this exactly. Here I show how LightBurn will automatically add tabs for me. In this case, several shapes cut from the same sheet, placing 2 tabs per shape and allowing some parts to fall out as I want. This is showing how LightBurn can assist with these complex tasks if trying to do by hand.
I am running a file now. Will see what transpires.
Please do let us know. We may be able to offer further suggestions that might help your workflow. 
Small portion of the piece I cut. The squares to the left didnât stay put. I cut the air assist down to 35psi but it blew some of the small pieces away anyhow. Tabs stayed in most places. Pushed a few pieces out, tabs a pain, a couple pulled pieces of veneer. Tabs would have to be cleaned up and most people wouldnât want to mess with that unless they were hard nosed model builders. lol
No doubt about it!
You can also configure the tab length and power level.
Longer tabs (IIRC, the default is something like 0.5 mm) would be more stable / secure, because they include more wood. The proper length surely depends on the grain, but a millimeter or two should improve the results.
With that done, increasing the power level (which I think defaults to 0%) to score the wood, but not burn completely through, would make the tabs easier to punch out with less surface damage.
So. Many. Knobs!
Thank you. Much appreciated to everyone.
From the picture youâve shown, I would guess that your shapes are âshatteredâ, IE not closed and continuous loops, so itâs applying tabs per piece of the shape, not for each intended outline.
For example, Iâve set Automatic mode and told it I want two tabs per shape, and I get this:
The reason is that the right shape isnât 1 shape, but 4 shapes, that happen to be touching. If I select them and move them apart a little, itâs easier to see:
Even without separating them, you can see the large green start/end nodes in Node Edit mode. The shape on the right has 4 start/end points, where the one on the left is only 1.
OZ,
I of course did not draw/write the program for the file I sent a portion of as you may know.
Problem with files downloaded from many free and paid sites is the fact the owners of them obviously do not check very closely on what they have drawn. Some very simple files have to be completely redone or just forget about them.
Thank you for sharing your time and knowledge and making an excellent overall program.
Often just un-grouping everything and using Auto-Join will get you most of the way there, as long as the shape ends are all touching.
If youâre getting DXF files, this is extremely common. A lot of CAD applications export DXFs as âline soupâ where everything is just a single line, arc, etc, and they just assume every other application will re-assemble it. Itâs maddening because they absolutely donât have to be this way.
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