Hole Pocketing 10mm Aluminium

Hey all,

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?

Settings I used:

Depth per pass: 0.254mm
Stepover: 1.429mm
Feedrate: 1524mm
Plungerate: 190.5mm
RPM: 15,000

I made a larger 7mm hole using the same settings and it drilled it out in small increments as I was expecting.

Thanks all!

Sounds about right. Slow your feed rate and plunge down.

That small of a pocket in relation to the end mill and it will appear to almost only be moving downward.

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.

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