Hello,
I am a member of the local Men’s Shed in Vernon, BC. We have an Altmill on order, expected to arrive around Xmas time, and I am very excited for it. It’s an upgrade from a worn out Openbuilds Workbee 4040. We chose the Altmill as an upgrade path for many reasons - Canadian company, includes VFD spindle, good size, the price is right, and Sienci machines appear to be well supported with a great active community.
This Altmill will mostly be used by CNC beginners, and one thing that we’ve struggled with the most on the Openbuilds machine is getting feeds and speeds right, it seems that if we slow down the router or speed up the machine to get the right feed rate, it doesn’t have the torque or stability to make clean cuts, so we end up having to run long jobs with shallow cut depths to compensate. After watching the Altmill plow through 3/4" ply in a single pass, I’m hoping this new machine can fix some of our current struggles :).
I found the excellent documentation provided for the Altmill in the Resource section here, however did not find a section with some feed and speed guidelines. I did find some documentation under the Longmill section:
Can the information provided in that link mostly be applied to the Altmill, or are there some different considerations for the higher power spindle? Once the machine arrives I’d like to put together some better training and resources for the guys at the Shed so this machine can be put to it’s best use and with high rate of success.
Thanks for reading.
