I bought the Amana AMS-119 starter kit with my Shapeoko 4. And, I’m not 100% sure where I can download the profiles for the feeds and speeds for these endmills. There is some info on the box, but it doesn’t have the same terminology as in Carbide Create, so I’m a little lost.
I’d like to cut some hardwoods like mahogony with them, but certainly don’t want to wear out my bits so early.
I can’t remember what’s on the leaflet in the box, can you detail what part of the teminology is confusing ?
The 119 kit has three tools:
60° vbit: you can look-up the recommended feeds and speeds in Carbide Create tool library, for the #302 tool (Carbide3D’s 60° vbit)
1/4" 2-flute downcut: you can look-up the feeds and speeds for #251 (Carbide3D’s 2-flute 1/4" downcut)
1/8" 2-flute downcut: settings for #102 should work (it’s Carbide3D’s 1/8" 2-flute upcut, but conservative feeds and speeds are basically the same for upcut and downcut)
There are two main mistakes you can do:
babying the cut in the hope of sparing your endmills, e.g. feeding slower than recommended. Since you would likely not change your RPM, this will actually reduce your chipload down to a point where the tool will be rubbing rather than cutting anything, which is the fastest way to end up with a dull cutter (and burnt wood, or worse)
cutting too deep. The deeper you go (per pass) the more forces are put on the tip of the endmill, then the endmill deflects, and they don’t like to deflect too much, so when they have had enough they snap. Not likely on a 1/4" endmill, but a real risk on 1/8" and smaller tools.
So if you want to go easy on your cutters,
make sure your chipload is not less than 0.001" (chipload is feedrate divided by (RPM x nb of flutes))
use a conservative depth per pass. I tend to recommend a maximum of 50% of the cutter diameter, but in mahogany and to be in a safe zone you could initially use as low as 1mm / 0.04", and you could always incrementally increase depth per pass later if you need to (the old Shapeoko3 feeds and speeds table said 0.1" depth per pass for a 1/4". Half that for a 1/8")
What @Julien said, but you can also look up the details for each cutting bit on the Amana website, too.
Just enter the Amana part number in the search box at the top of the page and you’ll get all the information I think you’ll need. Here’s the link for the V-bit (assuming it’s the imperial size).
