Cutting steel with 3040

I just cut a 16mm hole through 8mm of mild steel with a 1/8" 2 flute endmill. I used a feedrate of 200mm/min and plunge rate of 50mm/min with a 1.5kW spindle, 0.5mm steps on a small 3040 machine. Frankly I didn't really know what I was doing and just hazarded a guess at these rates and was prepared to sacrifice the cheap $1.50 endmill to see what happened. It cut just fine with seemingly no trouble.

Does anyone have experience cutting steel? feedrates etc.? I don't know if it can be pushed any harder.

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Originally Posted by htraps

I just cut a 16mm hole through 8mm of mild steel with a 1/8" 2 flute endmill. I used a feedrate of 200mm/min and plunge rate of 50mm/min with a 1.5kW spindle, 0.5mm steps on a small 3040 machine. Frankly I didn't really know what I was doing and just hazarded a guess at these rates and was prepared to sacrifice the cheap $1.50 endmill to see what happened. It cut just fine with seemingly no trouble.

Does anyone have experience cutting steel? feedrates etc.? I don't know if it can be pushed any harder.

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If you want to cut steel you need to have a milling machine, these machines can do it, but your spindle is not designed to cut steel and will prematurely fail, your machine also does not have enough rigidity to cut steel successfully, they can engrave steel just fine with no problems, use your machine for what it was designed for, the occasional chewing at a piece of steel most likely won't hurt much,

A Dremal can cut steel also but not very efferent way to do it