I’m hoping to pocket a bunch of 3.5mm holes in some 10mm aluminium plate using a 1/8" 2 flute carbide end mill using carbide create / carbide motion. I was thinking because 1/8" is 3.175mm and plus 10% makes 3.5mm so should be fine with pocketing command in carbide create.
I just ran a test hole and rather than cutting small amounts at a time, the router plunged straight through in one hit and cut the hole in about 5 seconds! I was expecting it to trim small amounts at a time. Obviously this puts too much strain on the end mill, anyone know why it plunged through rather than going slow?
Zoom on the hole in CC and you can see that some of the holes have one blue circle, some of them has two or more. That represents the passes on the same Z height. If you see just one blue circle that means that the end mill will not come up to retract height but will continue its way down according to your DOC setting. It looks scary at first but saves a lot of time. You can play with settings like this and not getting into trouble cutting XPS foam or something similar.