I have a round puck looking part to be cut from 4x4x.375 flat extrusions. Due to the saw cut, I should clamp on the extruded sides which have a radius on the corners. About 3/32.

The parts have a dish area in the center and a profile cut around the outside. Tolerance is not a biggy but surface finish is.

We use steps a lot and work just fine but would normally use smaller cutters for this and we need to haul ass so want to run a 1/2" tool. i am concerned I might pull the part from the jaws. The main issue with this I can can only hold the bottom .080 of the blank! Now, we just finished running some round parts that are 2" tall and holding only .080 on the bottom but we use a 1/4" tool on that!

My gut wants me to run a 3/8 tool here but the time cost is going to hurt the run. I realize if we really cared, we might hold this differently but we have to stay in a time budget on these and drilling and bolting the corners would hurt us. I am open to other options though.

what I am proposing on the center dish is a 40% step over at our required DOC of .200" with a .003-.004 chip load per tooth. The profile would need to hit .295 DOC with some full width cutting.


This brings me to my next problem of leaving this .080" foil on the bottom of a 4x4 blank and part is roughly 3.9" diam. I am not too interested on hand cutting these foils off before flipping but they might dance enough to break an endmill otherwise. I need to use the foils to support the cutting on the first side but trying to figure out a way to trim them before the flip?