I have seen posts from many people mentioning using tapered endmill and I can’t seem to find much information on these. I looked in the Wiki but did not see anything, it does not appear in the endmill section but maybe I missed something.
Could someone provide where I can find information as to when to use them, how are they defined in Carbide Motion, what to look for when getting one e.g.: number of flutes or size of taper, etc. material where they can be used successfully.
Usually tapered endmills are used for 3D cuts — Carbide Create doesn’t allow one to define them, nor does Carbide Motion.
You can get a preview of how they’ll cut using CAMotics if you work out a need to manually do CAM with them.
I believe MeshCAM and most other 3D CAM programs support them — Vectric might as well.
I use them for finishing 3d relief carvings, I have a few like this one 0.5mm tapered end mill - Ebay
Basically they are the same as a ball end mill, but let you have a much finer ball on the end, giving you a lot more detail, but because of the taper to a 1/4" shank they are a lot stronger so you can take deeper/wider cuts with them
If you created a toolpath in a 3D program like F360, couldn’t you run the GCode in CM?
I use tapered end mills for the finishing pass and path engraving pass on my terrain relief model carvings. They get me the detail of a very small ball-nose end mill but with much longer reach, allowing me to make deeper carves without crashing the collett into the walls.
I use PixelCNC to create the toolpaths, and then I run the G-code using Carbide Motion.
As for procuring tapered mills, I use basically the same ones as Stuart gets on eBay, but I get mine at Amazon in various sizes. (They’re probably from the same source in China, so it’s just whatever source is convenient, really.) Basic two-flute 1/4" shank, 31.75mm flute length, with whatever taper angle geometry requires for a given tip radius.
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