Positioning small pieces

I want to cut out holes for inserting speaker driver units into the baffles.
I have precut the baffles on a table saw for accuracy and speed.
My question is, how to place these pieces onto my spoilboard so that Maslow will correctly cut the openings.
Is there a method of measuring manually from the calibration pattern to ensure correct alignment, or is there an automatic method

Good morning @finchdoc ! The first project I completed with my M4 last year was building a pair of speaker boxes. Like you, I cut the sides of the boxes using the my table saw, and used the M4 to cut out the baffles- in my case a round cutout for the woofer and a second cutout with rabbet [rebate] above the woofer for the horn wave guide.

I did a few different things to position the baffles correctly. I was using a full 1/2-inch thick sheet of plywood as a spoil board, and I measured diagonally from the corners to find and mark the center. I also marked the spoil board with lines vertically and horizontally thru the center. I did the same with the two speaker baffles, marking the center and drawing a vertical center line with a pencil.

After everything was marked, I placed the baffles on the spoil board so the vertical centers were aligned and secured them by screwing down pieces of scrap next to them.

After my stock was positioned and secured, I setup the machine with my cutting mill installed and jogged it to the center mark of my stock. I lowered the z-axis so the mill was almost touching the stock, and using a flashlight I visually confirmed that it was in position. In this case, two baffles were cut from one piece of 3/4-inch ply, which I later cut to size with the table saw.

There was a lot of trial-and-error getting everything setup and running, but in the end I am very happy with the results. Make sure that you remember to hold down the X,Y home button for at least four seconds when setting the home position otherwise it won’t reset (a mistake I made more than once when trying to figure things out). Hope this helps…love to see some photos of your project when done!

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Thanks @Bhambrew, that is very useful, although I was hoping for an easier fix :slightly_smiling_face:

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