Great info thanks! I work as a CNC programmer at a medium sized shop that runs production and job shop work. We use Cat40 mills similar to a Haas VF2. For roughing, a Seco 1.25 high feed mill at 180in/min and 3000RPM .03 depth of cut in a standard Weldon style holder. The advantage of this is we get a good MRR and tooling cost is not bad because our finishing endmills only need to take out the .02 material left on the walls. I’ve had great success with the Mitsubishi ASX 445 that you recommend, and the APX3000 and APX4000 are great also.
excellent information! i have been able to push an endmill too hard in the syil x11 (should have used shrinkfit tool holding but don't have any.) ended up pulling the 1/2 inch endmill 2"loc yg1. 1 inch longer out of the collet holder. i think i was going 1"doc and .15 step over 7500rpm 120ipm. nothing broke but it was sketchy. i had to dial my cut parameters back. finding the sweet spot for the tool setup can be sketchy if over done.... oops lol
Thanks for that Jason, I’ll give that a try. I’ve got my aluminium speeds and feeds dialled now on my X7, but need to learn more for when cutting steels.
Thank you for sharing this Jason, perfect timing! I just started to machine toolsteels and it's a whole new world!. Only had experience with aluminium and carbon fiber so far which now seem very easy. The thing I'm struggling most is the z-feedrate for spiralling down into a cavity/pocket. Any rule of thumb there?. For aluminium I used 50% of XY-feed and that always worked without issues. With steel seem to burning through endmills very quickly.
Jason - thanks for your videos! One thing that I would love for you to talk about is how you set up tools for your machine. We have a Haas TM1P (10 tool umbrella/pre-NGC) and I cannot get my head around how badly the Haas and Fusion work together with regards to tool setup, and I think we most do it wrong because it can not be so stupid. You maintain tools in Fusion and a part needs you to change in 5 new tools. The Haas can handle 200 different tool numbers but it seems that there is no way to have a tool 43 in Fusion and Tool Setting 43 in the Haas and tell fusion that I have put tool 43 in pocket #9. It just seems really stupid that you don't keep tools maintained in Fusion, load them, point to pocket and have the Renishaw measure. Do we really need several overlapping processes? What is your best practice for going from one part to the next?
Turn off setting 15 on the house control. Infusion. You have to set the tool number to the actual pocket number the tools in. After you fill in the pocket number, the next field will allow you to put the offset number
have you ever tried high-feed mills? i'm currently messing around with some boehlerit solid carbide ones (box says FCH010.010.100 Cr Z6 050 HA if you wanna google) and while they say not to use them in alu, these things are FLYING and i don't have a mill with feed fast enough to actually max the spindle.
it varies so much with material , end mill size and machine rigidity i dont have a formula...i just go straight to FS Wizard on my phone. maybe i'll do some testing to see if i can be a better resource.
I ran a program I made on fusion for an apprenticeship I’m in. Okuma 560v 3/8 kennametal harvi 1 te cutting 4140. 455 SFM, .002 FPT. we were milling 2 pockets. First pocket helixed down to .468, full slotted about 3 inches, open up the pocket to 1.053. So ADOC was .468 and RDOC was .375. Did the second pocket under the same speeds and feeds and DOC’s. Program took 3:57 to mill out 1.063Wx.688deep slot and a .563 slot that was .440 deep for a total depth of 1.128. The other guy I’m in a friendly competition with for programming, took the high efficiency approach and his program took 48 minutes. After my tools and program ran the other 7 apprentices parts, and his part finally finished, we compared the tools and his tool looked significantly worse. If you use high tools it kind of blows regular formulas out the water
