Basically I cut a few pieces of practice wood on my manual rf-45 clone, and all went smoothly. So I felt it was time to start making a few metal chips.
Unfortunately the clamping kit I bought with the mill, didnt fit in the table... GRRRR... I had to grind the first two t-nuts so I could clamp the vise down, and THEN, I started to remove the excess metal off the other t-nuts using a 1/2" 2 flute HSS tin coated end mill - YAY, my first project!!!
First, I dont have real cutting fluid, which I am going to order tomorrow, but I was using some sort of slightly viscous oil I had laying around. (Im also learning how important a set of parallel blocks are...)
I now understand what people mean when they say chatter. Only, I was at the lowest speed ( 90 rpm ) and I was feeding the piece at a pace which must have been a record for slow feeding.... From what I have read on this forum, I understood that you should be moving pretty slow for steel. I was only removing at most .10.
I kept increasing and messing around with the speeds and feeds to get a feel of what works (Im really new at this), and the chatter ONLY mostly went away at 670 rpm. Is this normal?
Also, is it ok to start cutting without locking the gibs? I tried both locking the gibs and leaving them loose, and could not notice a difference even though Im sure its probably there...
Danny