Hello all.
I’ve tried looking for a thread that may answer the following question but was not able to find one.
I am looking to do fine detailed woodwork and am in need of quality detail endmills in both ball and Flat variety in .396mm (1/64in) size or smaller. I’ve seen an endmill pack on the carbide site but don’t know what I’m looking at. Anyone have any suggestion as to where I may find such mills?
That is very small. From experience I will tell you that most wood will not be able to hold/show details very well that require that small of a tool beyond small text engraving. If you really do need tools that small your options will be relatively limited. There may be others but I would look at these places:
I am not a fan of bit sets. They are likely a good price per bit but if you dont use all of the bits they are not such a good deal. Decide what kind of bits you need and buy those. You can always buy more later.
Tell the forum what you are going to machine and there is a wealth of knowledge for just about any material you want to cut.
Carbide3d has a lot of small bits. The good part about that are they are already in the tool database and you dont have to experiment to figure out the feeds and speeds. 3rd party bits can be good but you have to figure out the F&S yourself.
I do a decent amount of very small work in metal. Most of my bits are sub 0.7mm.
I get all of my super tiny bits from drillman1 /oliver tool company on eBay.
Most of them are Kyocera and all of them have been perfect as far as i can tell. I will second what gdon said, find a select few sizes you like, stock up on them, and really learn them. It’ll save you a tremendous amount of time and money.
I started off by buying a couple of each in .05mm increments and now i work almost exclusively with 0.2mm, 0.5mm, and 0.7mm buying them in multipacks.
I use carbide end mills from drillman1 on Ebay. I am not a fan of Ebay sellers usually, but drillman1 has been a rock solid seller. I have (way more bits than I am willing to admit) purchased a few bits form him, and most of them are 1/8" or smaller.
to do custom engraving on cribbage boards. I do use exotic (for the USA) very hard woods with very fine grain structure, such as Chakte Viga, Katalox, Purpleheart and Ipe as well as bamboo, hard maple and cherry.