Been milling aluminum for the past week. God I love the look and feel to machined metal.
It looks great. Can you give us some tips about feerate, spindle speed and mill type you use?
So I’m running a KL-4530 CNC router.
Electronics:
40V 6A PS
G540 drivers
282oz/in steppers
Spindle is one of those 300w aircooled spindles powered by the spindle controller that is normally sold with.
The RPM, I’m not sure. The spindle controller is tied into the 40V PS and is running at full speed. So whatever RPM the spindle runs at @40VDC?
Feedrate, milling out those letters, I’m running a 1/16 3-flute 1/8th shank endmill at:
30in/min
.003" Depth of Cut
Thats currently the sweet spot for my setup. I’ve gone through a whole bunch of endmills trying to experiment though.
Cutting out the object, I used a .1/8in 3-flute endmill
Feedrate: 20in/min
DOC: .005"
I have found the first past needs to go real slow if you don’t have a truly level bed/stock.
I have been using AutoLeveller to probe the top of the stock before milling to ensure a uniform cut. Especially if its a real small endmill.
I reckon that spindle is 12000 RPM tops. Thanks a lot for the details.
That is truly sweet! Looking forward to getting one of these together…
You should lay your hands on some brass. Carve some letters into it, and then polish it up. Looks like gold… Plus I think there’s a clear coat you can use on it so it holds it’s polished look…