Subscribe to Blog
Email Address
 

I regularly follow practicalmachinist.com forums.
Especially the cnc machining section of it.

I notice when CNC Speeds and Feeds questions come up people often suggest my HSMAdvisor Machinist calculator.
A referral by a satisfied customer is the best referral in my opinion. Thank you to everyone doing this great favor to me and my prospective users!

Other times users of HSMAdvisor question speeds and feeds it generates and instead of going to me, they ask on forums.
Which is always fine, because extremely often "wrong" results mean something wrong in users expectations or the data he feeds the calculator

In the process of discussion it usually turns out that the calculation results were correct, but because user decided to use a depth of cut or tool length, larger than he should have, HSMAdvisor compensates and gives a very conservative feed rate.

Just like in this forum post over here: Engraving with a 1/32 ball mill machinist wanted to use a 1/32" ballnose endmill to engrave 304 Stainless Steel at 0.010" depth of cut.

Quote:
Material is 304 laser cut, machine is a Haas VF-6SS with a 12k spindle. Obviously spinning at 12k, but what would everyone's feed be at .01" deep? HSMAdvisor always seems to me to be very low on these numbers (1.41 IPM? Yes this is with chip thinning turned on). Tool has a 1/4" shank and a real short flute length, solid carbide AlTiN coated.

Naturally HSMAdvisor was not too happy and suggested a very low feedate for such an operation.
Proper depth of cut would be about 0.002" for such a small tool and it would yield a much faster cutting rate.

Eventually, though, machinists who have run similar jobs pointed out that the Depth of Cut was excessive for such a tool/material combination and suggested both larger tool and shallower depth of cut.

Quote:
Why .010 deep with a 1/32? Why not .005 with a 1/16 and triple your feedrate?

Quote:
That sounds deep to me as well. I end up going only a few thou deep to get a pretty decent width line. Sneak up on it, and either ramp in or slow down the plunge like Haazart said.

Eventually the original poster changed to a 1/16" ballnose and 0.005" depth of cut.

Quote:
I'm going to change it to .005" with a 1/16" cutter. This is going straight on the subplate, so if it varies I'm going to blame Chick Workholding. Which I wouldn't mind doing anyway

Edit: got the part indicated with a tenths test indicator (I have a VERY short flat to work with) within two tenths end to end, and checked the flatness of the part. Around the area to be engraved it's all within five tenths. Should work okay.
 

Quote:
Wish I could take a photo to show, but it came out awesome. 12k, 10.7 IPM, .005" deep.
 

What do you know!
That's exactly what HSMAdvisor suggests for a 1/16 ballnose and it apparently worked out awesome!

Thank you, Atomkinder for the follow up on the results of your machining!

Comments:
No Comments posted yet, be the first one!

New Comment to: Perfect Ballnose Engraving Speeds and Feeds in Production Environment

Name: *
Solve Capcha:
*
Sing In

© 2009-2022 Eldar Gerfanov. All Rights Reserved.
© 2009 Eldar Gerfanov. Materials on this site are presented as is and are mostly for educational use.

You may freely reproduce information presented herein without any consent from me, provided you include link to this site.
In case when i am not the copyright holder, you may want to contact proper owner of material. Anyway, they are freely available on the Internet.
If you hold the copyright right for any of the materials on this site and want them removed, please contact me here