By Team FORG3D
If you were in the Festool community when the VAC-SYS was discontinued, you know the feeling. A capable, purpose-built vacuum workholding system — gone. What followed was a quiet scramble across forums, dealer networks, and secondhand listings that the community came to call, generously, the Great VAC-SYS pilgrimage. Most people came back empty-handed.
We almost did too.
How it started
The immediate backstory starts a little earlier than the VAC-SYS. We had just acquired our first CNC, purchased specifically to drill and form ABS panels for an assembly we were building for a B2B customer. Once vacuum workholding was running in the shop for that job, it was obvious we wanted it everywhere else. The VAC-SYS seemed like the right move.
Then Festool discontinued it.
We went looking like everyone else and came back without one. We decided that at some point we'd build our own — not a generic shop vacuum solution, but something designed for how we actually work.
That plan sat on a back burner until an errand changed things. We went to our local Festool dealer to pick up a dust extractor.
The back room
We got the extractor out to the vehicle and remembered we hadn't grabbed the accessory kit that came with it — packed in its own Systainer. We went back in and asked. The dealer told us he'd have to check in back.
While he was gone, we were standing in front of a wall of Systainers. There was the vacuum accessory kit, right on the wall. We grabbed it.
He came back out carrying a Systainer and said, more or less: "Is this what you're looking for? It says vacuum on it."
We knew exactly what was in his hands before he finished the sentence. We opened it — pod heads, not a full turret — and asked if we could look in the back. He said yes.
On a shelf, we found four VAC-SYS turrets. At the eBay prices they were fetching at the time, that find could have funded a college tuition or two. We bought all four. Sold three to people in the community who had been looking. Kept one.
The problem the VAC-SYS couldn't solve
Having the unit in a small shop taught us something quickly: a vacuum workholding system that has to be set up and broken down every session creates its own kind of friction. The VAC-SYS had to come out, get used, go back. In a compact shop where bench space is a constant negotiation, that cycle adds up. The problem wasn't the capability — it was the deployment model.
We needed something that lived in the bench, not on it.
The second signal came from a specific job that required workholding the VAC-SYS couldn't deliver — the geometry and use case were simply wrong for what we needed. That problem became the genesis of what eventually became our Shaper Plate pods, and more importantly, it confirmed the direction: we were going to build vacuum workholding from the ground up.
The original idea
Here's the part that matters for the AnchorPod story: AnchorPod was always the original concept.
The design intent from the beginning was a bench-integrated anchor — something that dropped into a 20 mm dog hole, routed vacuum below the surface, and gave you an unencumbered work surface with three distinct capabilities: a foam gasket for direct vacuum hold, a mechanical dog mode for non-vacuum fixture work, and a pod interface for elevating your workpiece off the surface with a dedicated vacuum pod. One body, three modes. The bench becomes the workholding platform.
That's what we wanted to build. And that's exactly what AnchorPod is.
Why BenchGrip shipped first
BenchGrip came to market before AnchorPod, but not because it was the original idea. It came first for two reasons.
The first was complexity. AnchorPod requires a precision-machined lower body and an additively manufactured upper. The machined base handles the vacuum routing — internal airflow channels need the tolerances that only machining delivers for consistent pressure stability. The additive upper is what makes the doghole integration work: the geometry for sealing, compression, and mechanical anchoring across different bench thicknesses and doghole tolerances is complex enough that additive manufacturing is the only practical way to produce it. Getting those two components engineered, sourced, and validated — finding machinists for the base, dialing in the additive upper, aligning production — takes time.
BenchGrip was a simpler, faster path to market. It let us test whether the SYS-GRP ecosystem had traction while we finished the harder engineering problem.
The second reason was the patent. What AnchorPod does — the bench-anchored vacuum approach, the three-mode hybrid body — was something we knew to be genuinely novel. We wanted the patent-pending designation in place before we released it. BenchGrip gave us the runway to get that right.
What shipped
AnchorPod launched with the design intent intact. The precision-machined base routes vacuum from below the surface. The additively manufactured upper seals against the doghole grid and provides the mechanical anchoring behavior. Three modes — AnchorDog, Gasket, and Pod Integration with the Edition Maximus and Magnus pods — just as the original concept described them.
The AnchorPod Edition bundles exist because of that Pod Integration mode. The Maximus and Magnus Edition pods were designed specifically to pair with the AnchorPod foundation — giving you elevated, hose-free workholding that the original design had always intended.
The VAC-SYS was the impetus. The small shop deployment problem sharpened the requirement. A job the VAC-SYS couldn't handle confirmed the direction. And a lot of engineering work — most of it invisible to the person using it — turned the original idea into the system it was always meant to be.
Explore the SYS-GRP AnchorPod system.
SYS-GRP by FORG3D
Your Workflow. Without Limits.