Why don't you just get someone to water-jet cut, and carry on cutting wood?
On 21 February 2017 at 17:34, Todd Zuercher <zuerc...@embarqmail.com> wrote: > 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 spiral 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. > > -- > > ======================================== > > Todd Zuercher > mailto:zuerc...@embarqmail.com > > ======================================== > ------------------------------------------------------------ > ------------------ > Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most > engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
