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What I cannot find is anything that ties in Ap (depth of cut) and Ae (step over or width of cut) to any of the above. I would have expected the Ap and Ae combination to exert some requirement of Vf (feed rate)
Just a few more variables to be thrown into the pot that as you say a hobby user does not tend to need to look too far into but worth bearing in mind such a when doing pockets to try and make sure any internal radii are larger than the tool radius so you don't get chatter in the corners or worse weld a bit of aluminium to your tool.
It's interesting to compare the Hoffmann and Guhrung information.
Have you tried lower Ae values yet?Mike
Experimenting with lower Ae values and higher Fz feed rates should be interesting, it's the way they are going in industry. True, we would be ill-advised to try and reach industrial speeds on our Hobby machines, but we can follow the general trend towards lower Ae and higher Fz. I will lead the way. I need to machine some pockets 9.7 mm deep for the W165 gear box covers, in 6082 t6. I will use the same 7.0 mm dia carbide cutter as before. Therefore the Ap will be 1.4 D. I propose to use an Ae of 0.15 D (as before) I am going to wind the spindle speed up to max 5300 RPM and raise the feed rate to 320 mm/min for starters. LinuxCNC provides a slider to adjust feed rate while you machine. I can start with a very conservative feed rate and increase it towards 360 mm/min untill it hurts. Mike
Turned out well and always satisfying when you have a big pile of chips at the end of the day.It would be interesting to see if going to a 3-flute cutter would allow for an even faster feed yet keeping the chip load the same, the machine may have to work harder but possibly not if the low Ae means only one flute is cutting at any one time? I've tended to go for 3-flute when buying carbide cutters for teh CNC as I also like the FC-3 HSS ones for the manual mill so don't have much in the way of 2-flute tooling except for a couple of HSS aluminium specific ones that came via ARC and most of those are long series which do seem to chatter a bit. I've also gone for 4-flute ball nose cutters so I can feed them faster for 3D finishing.Just make sure you don't go too blue in the face and pass out trying to keep pace with chip production