I am a wood worker in a large wood working CNC shop. But I need to mill some aluminum for a project (a jig for another process in our company) but I know next to nothing about milling such material. What I need is to cut a large grid out of a 5ft x 10ft sheet of 1/4inch thick MIC6 AL. The machines I will have to do this are large wood working cncs with flat vacuum tables. We normally cut flat sheet material like MDF or plywood on a MDF fall-board (vacuum sucking right through the fall-board (holes, no jig tape, just porous MDF) These machines have no provisions for coolant Just compressed air blast and dust/chip collection (big centralized dust collector system). I will obviously have to disable the dust collection, because I'm pretty sure the local farmers who pick up our dust won't appreciate AL shavings in their cow bedding. The machine I am probably going to use has a 12kw 24krpm spindle. I would like to mill this with a 1/4" 2 flute carbide end mill. Should I use an up or down s piral cutter? What feed speed and RPM would be appropriate? What depth of cut per pass? Do I need to arrange some sort of mist system for cooling? What to use and how much liquid in the mist? (Don't want to cause problems with the MDF fall-board or vacuum hold down system.) The grid is only going to be about 2 inches wide, with 12 windows in the 5x10 frame (a lot of wasted material). At this point the plan is to set the milling up with lots of bridges to hold the grid to the scrap then go back and trim those off with a final finish pass.
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