Depth of cut in hardwood

I’m doing pocket cuts in red oak. Is settings depth of cut per pass at .10 too conservative or too aggressive
Thanks in advance

Inches or mm? Size of mill?

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Inches 3/4”inches using a 3/4 inch down cut end mill

I mean a 1/4 inch end mill

It depends on how many flutes the tool has and what sort of finish you want and what sort of torque your spindle has, and how loud you are willing for the cut to be.

The nice thing is, depth of pass is the easiest thing to experiment on — just get a piece of scrap, cut it off at an angle, clamp it in place, work up a series of pockets which start at the low end and each makes a single pass removing depth of pass material + material added by the rise — stop the machine when the cut becomes untenable, and measure the last successful cut.

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Why would you use a downcut bit for a pocketing operation? I can see using it for a contour finish pass to minimize the fuzz, but in a pocketing operation you’re just forcing the chips down into the material, and not up and out of the cut.
Perhaps I’m missing something but the only two reasons I can see for using a downcut bit is for what I mentioned earlier, and for helping to hold down thin materials while cutting.

Like most things in life, it’s a tradeoff — foregoing the tool change may be better than the problems of using a downcut.

Maybe, like me, he’s new and unaware. Glad to now know I should use an upcut for pocket operations.

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It’s an extra bit change, But you can rough out the pocket faster with an upcut, which would make up for the bit change for the finish cut.

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Yes, I am new at this so the info people like you provided is very valuable
Thanks

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Another question, can you use a ball nose bit to cut letters??

I cut a ton of oak. Ruff pocket… .05 depth, 3 flute upcut, 12000 rpm, 60 ipm then downcut contour to finish with nice clean edge. On the ruffing pass make the 1/4 e.m. .300 dia. to give you extra meat to cut finish pass.

Yes — it matches best when one uses a typeface w/ rounded ends and even stroke weight such as:

EDIT: unfortunately, as pointed out by @mhotchin this font has technical errors which make it unsuited for use.

However, I believe Carbide Create bundles “Basic Rounded Bold” which works well:

(at least I guess it’s a Carbide Create font — my other apps go from Bahnschrift Semi Light Semi Condensed to Baskerville Old Face)

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How can I import National Park Type Face into my Carbide Create font library

CC just uses the fonts that are installed on your computer, there’s no need to do anything CC specific.

Download and install the font - if there are different versions, get the TTF one. If it asks, install for 'All users". Restart CC, it should now be one of the font choices.

All that being said, there’s something broken in CC - on Windows 10, trying to use the National Park font instead substitutes “MS Shell Dlg 2”, which sounds a lot like a fallback font when something goes wrong.

If you choose one of the variants where the weight is in the name, then it mostly works, but you immediately run into the problem that the font itself is poorly formed - letters with self intersecting curves, and letters with overlapping regions. All in all, it’s a crappy font for carving.

Ah, that’s unfortunate.

Will have to check the license and see if these infelicities can be addressed.

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Thank you for the daily lesson.

infelicities

The word for today is " *perquisite". Let’s see how Will works that in.

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One of the reasons I enjoy working for Carbide 3D are the many perquisites of my employment.

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