Edit: Sorry I forgot to add that I’m working with Teak on this project
I’m usually working with pine, cedar, and other soft materials. I’m trying to take it slow, but this feels like it’s taking forever. Anyway my settings are
3D carve
Roughing pass with a 1/4in endmill
Feedrate: 40 ipm
Plunge rate: 12 ipm
Spindle speed: 10000 RPM
Step down: 0.0625in
Step over: 0.12in
Finishing pass with a 1/16in tapered ball nose
Feedrate: 100 ipm
Plunge rate: 50 ipm
Spindle speed: 12000 rpm
Step down: 0.025in
They don’t seem altogether unreasonable, though, I’ve never cut teak with a LM. How’s the machine doing? How’s the cut quality? If you feel like you can get a little more out of it, use the override. If the cut quality suffers or the machine starts to struggle you can always back it off again.
I was really nervous at first because it was sounding horrible but quickly realized I forgot to turn my rpm down. After turning the router all the way down, both the sound and the chip load started improving although I think the chip load was still a bit too small. Too small compared to the chips I normally get from Cedar. I did increase the feed rate by about 30% during the cut.
Cut quality on the roughing pass was really frayed along any and all edges but the finishing pass which I’m doing now seems to be cleaning that up really well.
The finishing pass ended well and I moved on to a profile cut to cut the pieces out but it didn’t end well there. Started getting some slight chatter. I think because I increased my step down to .125. As the passes got deeper into the wood which is just over an inch thick, it started sounding worse. I’m wondering if that is from the top of the bit rubbing against the wood more so than from the cutting.
Anyway toward the end of the tool path I encountered quite a few errors in Gsender, Error 2s and Error 33s. Bad Number Format and Invalid gcodes. I guess I’ll try to finish tomorrow.