Flat work surface

[patofoto (Patricio Suarez)]

I have a sea of holes aluminum table. Essential to my work holding efforts. It was looking dinged and nicked after many hours of usage. I decided to resurface it today and discovered to my surprise that it was uneven. I expected some but this is what it looks like after two passes of -0.0025. The top right corner got material taken off by just running the surfacing path at Z0. The extra 0.0050 taken out after two passes had the board looking like this:

The top left corner and the tip of both bottom corners left untouched. It took an additional pass of -0.0025 to have it like this:

It still looks like I could do one extra pass. It feels very smooth but looks funky. All done with a 1/4" flat endmill. Any suggestions to even the look out?. Polishing?.

[Winder (Will Winder)]

I’m not sure how much of this information actually transfers over to this sort of machining, but… I’ve seen several Keith Rucker video’s on youtube where he’ll use a sharpening stone to take down any burrs on the surface when it gets to this point.

[mikep]

A piece of scotchbrite rubbed over that will take most of the marks out pretty rapidly.

[cgallery (Phil Thien)]

Looks good!

What kind of runtime were you getting for each of those passes?

[patofoto (Patricio Suarez)]

About 17 min. I wanted to be conservative to minimize chatter as I was using a 1/4" end mill. Wanted as smooth a finish as I could get. To the touch is very smooth.