It seems that there are several vendors hawking roughing bits for CNC use on wood. Prominent ones are the IDC Woodcraft Beast, Hog badger series, the CIC workshop Golden Boy bits, and the Carbide3D 213 rougher in the Ocho series. For those unfamiliar with these, they have serrations along the cutting face to make smaller chips and have less cutting edge in contact at the same time allowing for a faster removal rate (or so I interpret the limited info out there)
These look like the old machinist’s roughing bits for Aluminum. Do these have the cutting geometry optimized for wood, or are they just repackaging metal machine shop roughing endmills?
Are these particularly fragile? Reading the reviews on one vendors offering, it seems a fair number of reviews talk about breaking the bit (even in the five star reviews).
Since I have not seen a lot of discussion on these (other than on the other vendors’ channels pitching these, are they worth it? I am assuming the #213 is probably a bit more robust being 8 mm vs 1/4 inch (6.35 mm).
Another question is how do they perform in the different materials. Do they do better in solid wood vs. plywood? One of my use cases would be cutting out handholds on small crates/boxes for storing stuff in my shed. (I have done some in the cheap sheathing plywood,not great material but cheap, and for storing garden chemicals ok).
Adding;;;I am running a Pro XL with the ER-16 spindle if that matters.
I have the IDC and CIC roughing bits. To me they seem equal, rip through hardwood and run fairly cool for how hard I push them. I don’t have a ton of time on them in laminates but the few cuts I have made the performance was the same. I just made sure I offset the roughing pass farther away from my finishing pass to prevent small chipping of the laminate surface close to the final pass. These are my go to for pockets unless its very small pocket and not worth the time to swap bits. This also extends the life of standard bits,
For plywood I use a compression bit. I don’t have any use cases for a pocket in plywood other than something like the BAMX from CIC. I recently did a game set from CIC which called for a lot of pockets and for that I used their compression chip breaker bit. It made very clean cuts in the BAMX, I have not tried it on anything else.
I wonder how the #213 compares. It is a bit bigger so should be able to take a little more on a pass. 8 mm vs 6.35 mm (1/4 inch)
Costwise #213 is $32 (plus $25 for the ER-16 8mm collet)
IDC Beast is $44.14 (but most of the versions seem to be sold out)
CIC Golden boy $39.99
Not sure on the differences in shipping costs
I really have not see much discussion about the #213 (or any of the Ocho series for that matter)
I feel bad that the El Ocho tooling hasn’t been much discussed — I’ve been using them for my own projects for a long while and they are awesome (and the feeds and speeds not being limited by the torque of a CCR makes for much better material removal rates).
I don’t have much 3rd-party tooling, so can’t do a direct comparison, but if someone wants to see an example cut, let me know and I’ll get a file put together, some stock clamped in place, make the cut, and at least post a photo and a note on actual cut time.
I have several and they work excellent, as my 1/4” bits get dull I will replace the ones I can with the El (or 8mm - 5/16” equivalent). This bridges a gap for me to not needing an 80mm spindle for my hobbiest work I do. The 65mm spindle will handle the 8mm bits just fine, understanding tooling is part of knowing that the bit is larger, will load the spindle up more and feed/speeds have to adjusted accordingly.
It’s well worth the few dollars for the larger bit and I’m lucky the ER11 will accept the 8mm or 5/16” bits.