Question on cutters

About to order the Nomad and have been studying cutters. I was wondering if anyone had ideas on the cutters on Ebay from China for practice. Theyā€™re very cheap and Iā€™m sure they are junk. But what about for practicing? Any thoughts? Iā€™ll be doing a lot of small detail and engraving work in metal. Any suggestions?

In general the ā€œcheapā€ cutters just donā€™t last. With that being said some of the guys have had great success using the less expensive cutters including myself. I did purchase the cheaper ones for practising and getting use to my machine but most of that time was spent on wood.

Good luck and congrats on your new Nomad.

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Agree w/ @Bjohnes ā€” some cheap endmills for initially getting started and practice are a good idea, esp. if one wants to use 1/8" ones (EDIT: in scrap/soft materials as @Luke noted below) ā€” that said, the Nomad eliminates quite a bit of the danger to new endmills, so feel free to enjoy using nice ones!

Carbide 3D has a page on this: http://carbide3d.com/docs/tooling_guide/

I bought some cheap cutters, but they were a bit of a waste. They blunt quickly or can damage work - now if I practice I use good ones, nothing worse then wrecking you ā€˜practiceā€™ with a duff end because then you have to practice moreā€¦

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At the same time, as youā€™re learning speed/feed it is nice to know that wasnā€™t a $20 end mill you just jammed into the work at mach 5 and snapped off (whether itā€™s a cheap or expensive tool, youā€™re still going to ruin the work, and snap off the end mill). Theyā€™re cheap, you just need to be willing to throw them in the scrap carbide bin and start with a fresh one. I really donā€™t think they make that much difference in wood and plastic. Metal is a totally different story, but I wouldnā€™t suggest starting with aluminum as ā€œpractice materialā€ for the first project you try.

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Iā€™ve never seen it mentioned here, but why not use high speed steel cutters? They are a lot less brittle and I imagine for a lot of jobs carbide provides no real benefit. Also, for practice, 1/4" shank endmills are much much more forgiving. I understand the torque limitations of the Nomad are prohibitive, but I use them successfully on plastics. Another thing Iā€™m experimenting with are radiused cutters. They are much less likely to chip while plunging.
Jerry

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HSS is surprisingly hard to find in 1/8". The nomad comes with a 1/8 collet only. You can get others, but thatā€™s all that is in the box. Iā€™ve gotten a few 1/8" HSS tools myself recently, and have been meaning to try them on aluminum. The 1/4" tools -are- pretty durable by comparison, but yeah, theyā€™re not real useful on anything but plastic on the nomad. Iā€™ve been able to use them on wood, but it was more hassle than it was worth on the nomad.

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Yeah, I forgot to mention that I have the 1/4" collet. Most of my HSS tools are Dremel bits-they arenā€™t exactly endmills (they donā€™t plunge cut and have like 8 flutes. It would take a lot of experimenting to come up with usefull feeds and speeds. Iā€™m still looking into some other spindle option to solve the torque problem. Makerdreams uses a 300 watt RC motor without closed-loop speed control and Othermill has a new high speed spindle, so I know itā€™s possible. Just havenā€™t gotten around to trying it. Iā€™ve also thought about using a flex shaft to connect a large brushed motor to the Nomad pulley. If I had the room I would probably move up to the Tormach PCNC 440. I happen to live close to Santa Cruz Electronics, their only California showroom and itā€™s an an awesome real mill.
Jerry

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I usually advocate for HSS, really sharp for a finishing pass in materials which benefit from the sharpness of steel, but donā€™t need the toughness of carbide.

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This is my latest (cheap chinese) engraving cutter.
It works beautifully on brass :slight_smile:

My other cutters I get from grainger, and I always stick with carbide.

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