I have been trying to cut 1/4” ABS sheet of plastic and having to stop and start due to melted ball of plastic sticking to end mill. The end mill I am using is a 1/8” single flute flat end, feed rate of 1100mm per minute, a plunge rate of 250, step over of .35, a step down of 1.5mm, and a spindle speed of 12000rpm. These settings have eliminated the ball forming on the drill bit but now a substantial amount of burr/debri remains attached to the sheet and I need to spend a substantial amount of time deburring the material after it is cut. Can anyone offer an improvement to my settings. Regards
@hectorton I’ve only done one project in ABS, but I’ve done several in acrylic and in corian. I’m using the same bit that you are, but my feed rate is closer to 750 mm per minute. Plunge is half that. Stepover does not come into play with the through cuts that I am doing, so I can’t comment on that. I only deal with stepover with pocketing and 3D carving. I set the number of passes in the cam software, so step down really does not come into play for my projects, either.
I don’t remember my settings for the ABS project that I did, but I believe that they were roughly the same as these. I’m pretty sure that I started with these, but may have changed them on the fly in UGS. I do know that the finish was quite good. If you getting burrs on the sheet, you are still melting. (You likely know that.)