Basic F&S/DOC/WOC recommendations

Welcome to the forum! Glad you are having a great time and learning.

As you have read, the general rule for rigidity limited machines like the Shapeoko is to do high WOC and lower DOC. The Shapeoko Pro is quite a bit more rigid than the Shapeoko 3 but the rule still applies.

As for general recommendations on actual speeds, this gets pretty hard because it really depends so much on the material, end mill, cutting strategy and geometry you are cutting. The general rule of maintaining a minimum chipload of 0.001" is a great place to start. As you get more comfortable and gain a feel for the CAM side of things, you can push that much farther. Your intuition looks mostly correct, just keep in mind the first thing I wrote about Shapeoko’s being mostly rigidity limited. If you want better finishes, go slower. If you want more material removal, go faster.

At some point you will screw up and that is okay. I would just highly recommend you have some sort of E-Stop setup. Something that will cut power to the machine and router at the same time and is in easy reach.

Here are my general rules:

I always run adaptive clearing at 75% WOC and change the DOC based on the material.

Finish contours I typically run at 150-200% DOC when compared to my adaptive DOC in the same material.

For finishing the bottom of pockets I try to run no more than 0.01" DOC just to help improve the finish quality.

I am not sure what you mean by finishing surfaces but contouring and pocketing should cover that.

The recommended feedrate range is not really relevant information in my opinion other than the concept that slower generally equals better finishes.

Depending on the end mill and materials you can have chiploads much lower or higher than 0.001" but it is a good starting place for anything with a diameter above 1/8" on these machines. I have run as low as 0.0003" and as high as 0.012" depending on material and end mill size.

Learning CAM in Fusion 360 and in general can feel like drinking from a fire hose. Just keep experimenting and you will get more and more comfortable.

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