Newbie general questions

General biggener questions (mk2) 4830

Hello. I have had my sienci labs mk2 for a week now and have some questions. I am using fusion for cad and cam and g sender

What depth of cuts should i be taking with a 1/4 and 1/8 2 flute end mills? What about comp bits?

I have been running my mill around 2000mm/min and it feels like im pushing it hard. Should i go at a slower rate?

With a comp, im getting a lot of tear out on plywood as its ramping into the cut before it gets to the downcut part. What can I about this?

Any and all advice is welcome even if its not related to the questions asked!

I am usually pretty conservative, I think, with my depth of cut. I run 30-40% of the bit width for the depth. At 40% of the width your depth of cut would be 0.1" or 2.54mm for 1/4" bits and 0.05" or 1.27mm for 1/8" bits. With those depths I feel comfortable with the speed you are using.

As far as tear out with a compression bit I have yet to use one but I think plywood is prone to tear out. I am assuming that you use the compression bit to through cut profiles and such. I am OK at modelling in Fusion but have never ventured into the CAM part of fusion so Iā€™m not sure what is available there. The reason I mention this is because with Vectric VCarve, which I use, there is an option to do a separate last pass on profile cuts. You set a distance and the profile will be cut that far away from the line until the last pass which cleans up the cut. Not sure if Fusion has something similar but it could help with tear out.

Rools, a general rule of thumb that I have followed for years using hand held routers is a max depth of cut of 0.25in irrespective of bit diameter. The tool library from Sienci is more conservative than this. Speeds should be based upon rotational speed of bit and the speed the bit travels through the material that will produce chips of wood and not dust. Again these baseline speeds are listed in the tool libraries. Tearout is something that is always a possibility with ply irrespective of bit used, I invariably I use downcut on ply with the best face up. In many ways milling is a trial and error process. The settings in the tool libraries give good starting points and during the job both the router speed and feed rate can be adusted to suit. Hope this helps.

Thanks for the tips. I will look into fusion to see if I can find a way to run a rough then a finish pass at the final dimensions

Thank you for the info. I will experement further to see if i can get better results