Improving cutting speeds

I have a few of the Carbide 3D mills and some Yonico from Amazon which seem to be pretty good, they have some decently cheap 1/4" compression cutters for plywood, I use some cheap Trend chamfer and round nose bits for detail which also seem to work just fine.

I’m using Winston’s tool library of the Carbide bits for Fusion 360 which is a great starting point to give you sensible numbers, thanks Winston.

For the 1/4" cutters; 15k RPM, 300metres / min.
In the heavy birch ply I’m currently going 6mm deep with 2mm Optimal Load in adaptive clear but the spindle sounds like it could do more than that, still working up from the little AMB Kress.
In lighter material (with less epoxy) you can push harder.

If I’m cutting a contour without an adaptive or pocket clearing first there’s a lot more engagement so I run less depth, 4mm or so in the birch ply and cut a slot about 2mm wider than the bit in two passes at each stepdown to make sure I have space to clear the chips, again this will probably go up with the bigger spindle as I figure out what the machine will take.

For the smaller 1/8 inch cutters which are generally doing wall finishing or detail it’s 15k RPM, 150 metres / min and then 3-5mm stepdown with 0.5 or 1mm stepover with a repeat finishing pass.

I generally find that some parts of the job sound a bit chattery and I push the spindle VFD speed up or pull the feed override down in CC, those tend to be slot cutting, when I hear the machine being lazy I jack the feed override up in CC to see how hard I could have set it in Fusion.

Does that help?

(edit)

Also, I’m learing to use the stay down and order by Area in Fusion to reduce the time spent waiting for the HDZ to go up and down…

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