Speeds, feeds and settings

Hi Rob. It should be possible to work in either imperial or millimetres. It is the relationship between the numbers which is what matters.

I am looking at those numbers for feed and pass, your #201 cutter and the results you have pictured. The pictures show tearout at the top of your workpiece, rather than a nice clean cut. This is strongly suggestive that the cutter is proceeding too fast through the workpiece and is tearing the top layer of material as it passes. The depth of cut looks a little too deep for the speed of the cutter through the workpiece. The workpiece material is probne to tearout and voids. Some people may suggest to you that a downcut cutter will fix this issue. It may but the problem of feed speed and size of cut has not been addressed by that solution.

You can go back to millimetres if that is your comfort zone and then you do not have to try and grasp the imperial measurements and their implications. That speed of 75" per minute equates to 0905mm per minute. If this were my own workpiece I would be dropping that speed to 1000mm/min. In carbide motion you have the ability to dynamically adjust the rate of feed up or down during the cutting process.

The 0.060" pass depth is more than I would subject a cutter to in the first instance. It equates to 1.524mm and the reason that the depth may be too much is that the cutter is engaged in using 100% of its surface area when slotting, cutting the material directly without having any relieving spaces surrounding the cutter. In my world, I would start at 0.5mm and watch, listen and feel how the machine is working. If the cut is too heavy, you will hear the machine fighting as it moves the cutter forward and you will likely feel some vibration through the trails.

Initially, you could aim to have a quiet and comfortable machine that does not feel strained. It will preserve your machine and your tool life. You can always ramp up the cutting speed and depth, depending on material desired finish orf the workpiece

This link shows an olive wood carving. It is very nice wood to carve and for my roughing pass, I used a two flute 6.35mm (¼") cutter at 1000mm/min and a pass depth of 1mm at 10,000 rpm. Note how clean the cut looks.

For my finishing pass, I did not wish to sand the model detail at all because I wanted to retain the details as carved. I used a circumferential toolpath (to avoid repetitive lines like a ploughed field when using raster cutting) with a ball ended two flute cutter of 0.25mm (0.00984"). I was using a 3D pass depth at 18,000 rpm. The pass depth for a 3D carve like this carves the whole of the depth all at once in that specific line of cut, hence the very small ball ended cutter.

1 Like