Tuesday Afternoon Cycle Time Testing 

This is mostly a documentary about cycle times to verify numbers on an RFQ we have. It's not an excellent test, but it works.
Test 1: Slitting .125" x .750" x .750" - this takes 7 seconds spinning a 6" blade at 6000 rpm and feeding at 40 IPM. It could have gone faster, but I didn't push it.
Test 2: Circular Pocketing - 30mm x 20mm deep, 1/2" 3 flute end mill. Feeds vary by type of cut being made - 40-120 IPM. I used the Fanuc Manual Guide i, which makes it easy to add holes for testing. This takes about 10 seconds/hole. This helped us understand that drilling these is probably the best option. We could try harder to test the idea, perhaps by going full depth with a helical interpolation then interpolating out to size - that might beat a drill/tool change. The challenge is that the part has two different sized holes, which means that you have to tool change twice to chuck up different drill sizes. Perhaps it was better to just keep the 1/2 EM in and just go to town.
The manual guide i is pretty nice, once you talk it into functioning - there seems to always be some learning curve for me for some reason... But adding different sized or shaped features is pretty sweet - changing feeds or paths or whatever is easy for testing because it's done at the mill. Pretty easy.