Originally Posted by
bebob1
Ive used some cheapo 3mm 3 flute end mills and ran perfectly with confirmed 6061 grade Al alloy, conservatively running 1mm DOC, 2500RPM, 70mm/min, 50% stepover. Nice long stranded chips.
The same config for unknown grade Al (must be some super soft stuff), and I lost 3 cutters attempting the run again, even after modifying DOC each time. The cutter gets clogged up and welded to the cutter I suppose and started to pull end mill out of collet and eventually snapped. The solution was to lower RPM, keep everything the same.
I guess it depends on your grade of aluminum also. Im looking for a good machining calculator/database also. Mostly I do a much conservative end of what those numbers come up to since those runs are using cheapo end mills. Expensive end mills give recommended chip loads?