Interesting Tech Projects
Posts tagged speed
CNC Cutting Speeds II
Sep 15th
Recently I wrote about the steps I took to reduce the cutting time of a particular part from 67 minutes down to 20 minutes. I have now purchased a couple of 1/8″ four flute endmills from Enco.
I can now cut the 1/8″ wide groove in the design, plus the outer profile with holding tabs much more quickly. In addition I can use the 1/8″ bit to perform a quick roughing pass on the pocket operation. Once complete I switch to the 0.0571″ endmill and make a finishing pass around the edges of the pocket, increasing the detail.
The new time, including the manual tool change, is about 10 minutes. Not bad. At the end of the cutting process the motors, stepper driver chips, transformer and dremel are all a lot cooler.
One small downside is that the 1/8″ bit make a lot of noise.
CNC Cutting Speeds
Sep 11th
I am working on a design that basically involves cutting out a 4″ diameter disk from 1/4″ thick wood, with some shapes pocketed into the surface of the disk. I have been using 10 inches per minute (IPM) to cut through the Poplar and I had no clue if this is average, fast or slow. What I do know is that it is painful to watch.
At 10 IPM cutting out the design took 67 minutes. That is probably split 60%/40% with the majority on the pocketing. Too long for my liking. I decided to try and reduce the cutting time. First I increased the speed to 30IPM, which is nearly the maximum that my PC can go. Next I reduced the depth of the pockets from 0.15″ to 0.10″. This saves an extra pass.
The new time to cut? 20 minutes. Less than 1/3 of the original time. But that’s no good if the result is a ragged mess. Tonight I found out – there are more burrs on the wood, but the vertical edges look just as good as the ones cut at 10 IPM. So I will likely continue to use 30 IPM in the future.
My next aim is to split the cutting into two parts. The pocketing with a 0.0571″ end mill and the rest with a 1/8″ end mill. This should reduce the time even further.
