I am making a pull out drawer for my router table. I am using 3/4 pine plywood for the drawer sides and other component. This is scrap construction grade sheathing .
I could have made most of it with a circular saw and my manual router table, but I wanted to test out the #251 downcut bit. I also never went through the mental gyrations for how big a sheet I can clamp down and nest the parts onto the sheet. A 2hr project is now 5 days in the stewing.
The Question I am going to use 18K rpm, 70 ipm with 0.125 DOC on a #201 and #251 bits. Sound ok ?
The pockets for the drawer sides will use the #251
I did make 2D Pockets (#251) for the cutout down a 1/2" from the Top, then a Contour (#201) with tabs for the last 1/4" .
I do not have a compression bit yet. I order some from Candence mfg, they shipped and UPS put it on someone else’s front stoop. Oops ! I put in a claim, let’s see how long this takes.
I have cut a lot of construction grade material and sometimes you will have a lot of material tear out due to voids in the glue layers. My suggestion is to slow down your cuts both the depth and the travel speeds until you see how the material cuts are going. You can increase the speeds while cutting in carbide motion but there is always the chance of the material tearing out while cutting when you use construction grade material.
My settings for starting off are .080 depth of cut and 40 ipm travel.
You can also measure the thickness of the lamination’s and do 1/2 of the thickness as your depth of cut this seems to help reduce some of the tear out.
Just don’t expect really good results with the construction grade material. You could see long splinters for tear out in some places.
Good luck with the claim with UPS. They will drag their feet as long as they can trying not to take the blame and giving you a refund for your lost purchase. UPS has been having issues as of late where packages have been coming up missing, and/or being delivered to the wrong address. Some of the missing packages have been taken by the drivers themselves claiming the package was delivered, but wasn’t. There was a story about this not to long ago where it was found out that the delivery drivers were stealing packages and selling them on selling sites.
Good luck on the return/claim.
As for construction grade plywood, and other construction grade material, You will more then likely see much tear out while cutting, especially with plywood. Lower grade plywood has voids in them like Anthony Vetrano mentioned and they can become very troublesome when cutting through them. Even the lower grade plywood will have issues with major tear out because the layers are ring grain.
In any direction of cutting you could expect tear out. Using a down spiral bit can help, but wont eliminate it altogether. If you can live with a bit of a rougher cut drawer, then no issues, but if you want something that looks good, then you might opt up to cabinet grade lumber/plywood to avoid the tear out as much. Anyway, good luck and happy milling.
Crisis averted! Glad you found them. Now hopefully someone didn’t see you go and take your package back while they were gone, then you would be seen as a package pirate. lol. Anyways, glad you got it figured out.
I am cutting the second sheet today. My cutting rates are much slower ( based on noise ) on the section of plywood. Now very similar to @avetrano numbers.
I have been wanting to cut bigger sheets of plywood and even possibly whole sheets of plywood, but my concern is the middle of the sheets. I know that as the machine runs across these areas and cuts, the tool will pull the material up into the cutter and cause off cutting and even worse splintering. I don’t see any way to lock down the middle areas without fighting with double sided tapes or superglue and blue tape.
I also don’t want to keep blasting nails into the material and into my hybrid table, because the mdf of my table would begin to crumble from shooting nails and then removing them over and over again. So, not sure how to combat this issue and still be able to run bigger material.
The plywood had a 1/8" bow in it and I didn’t have a way to clamp it down.
So I temporarily clamped the edges and pocketed 0.35 holes (2) through the plywood at a location ( I said the Thk was 0.95 to get over the material ) that was over a T slot and not in the product area.
I used 1/4 washers ( 3/4 OD ) and the 6mm screws to squish the plywood down and remove the temporary clamps.
