Wasn't sure where to put this. Can be moved if there's a more relevant section.

Lately I've been doing some jobs for a drone company. Mostly just prototypes and small preproduction runs. I'm cutting small parts out of 2mm, 3mm, 4mm, and 5mm carbon fiber sheet. Most parts only a few inches in size, many in a sheet. This has been a huge challenge and very hard to be efficient.

I'm curious if anyone on here has experience cutting higher volume of cf parts and how they do it. The 2 challenges are tooling and fixturing. Currently I'm doing submerged milling since it gives the best tool life, best looking edge, and completely eliminates all dust. Very bad stuff to breath. I'm doing this by first holding the sheet down at the corners and drilling all the holes in the parts. Pretty much everything is 3mm holes for m3 screws. Then I drill the same holes with a 2.5mm bit in an aluminum plate. I pick at least 3 or 4 holes per part. These 2.5mm holes in the aluminum plate are then tapped for m3 and I screw in 10mm tall standoffs. The drilled carbon fiber sheet is then placed on top of the standoffs, and secured with m3 screws so every part is supported as it's cut out of the sheet. I then proceed to fill the milling bath with water and a small amount of coolant to slightly above the sheet and cut all the parts. For tooling I'm using a diamond pattern or "burr rotary tool", which seems to be the most recommended tool for cf plate. Running at 24k rpm. Ive experimented with quite a few and tool life is terrible. A regular uncoated 2mm cutter lasts about an hour before it dulls to the point of no longer giving a perfect edge, or snapping. Fastest I can feed without snapping tools is about 100mm/m (4 inches) in the thinner stuff, and 60mm/m in the thicker 4 and 5mm sheets. At that feed, an hour doesn't get you that many parts. A 400mm x 500mm sheet full of parts can be many hours of machining time. Ive tried diamond coated tools and that only increased life maybe 50%, but 4 times the cost of uncoated, so not efficient at all. When using the cheaper uncoated tools, the cost isn't terrible, but the problem is having to babysit the machine to watch for snapping tools and changing it out often. These jobs wouldn't be bad if it could just run reliably unattended for at least a few hours. Aside from the tool life issue, my fixturing method with the tapped holes in aluminum and standoffs is obviously tedious and somewhat expensive. There has to be a better way but I don't know what it is. The company I'm doing the small runs for has their production runs done in China for less than half what I charge and as it is, im only getting 20/hr or so. They only use me for the quick turnaround time when needed in a hurry.

How are these parts being cut in volume efficiently and cheap? I guarantee they aren't fiddling around with tapped holes in plates and standoffs. Is there a better way? Tabbing the parts instead of holding every part down is not an option, since sanding every tab off to get perfect edges would be even more manual work than using standoffs. Also when I don't suspend the sheet above the surface, tools snap much quicker since it cant evacuate chips above and below.

Anyone have some insight on this?