I use NX7 for my modeling and CAM software and like most software, there is not necessarily an easy way to add tabs to hold work pieces in place as you are cutting them out. One of the options that is commonly used is to make the tabs part of the actual model itself or profile of curves. This can be time consuming some times and/or not really allow you to view your 3D model as it was meant to be, without tabs.

I came up with another option and that is when you are working in the context of an assembly in NX7, you can actually create a “tab” part (i.e. a 1/2″ x 1/2″ x 1/2″ block) and align it with your 3D model where you want the tab to be located. And you can even instance it multiple times to add as many tabs as you want.

Here is a picture of my layout assembly in NX7 of the top and bottom portion of my dust shoe. The green blocks are the tabs I added to the assembly:

The intention of these tabs is to interfere with the cuts along the perimeters of the parts. When you go to create the CAM operation in NX7 that cut the perimeters of the parts, you need to specify faces from the tab components in the “Check Boundaries” options so that when the tooling paths are created, it will jump over (avoid) those tabs. Here is an example tooling path resulting from this: