Today marks the day on which I finally (and fearlessly LOL) conquered aluminum. No broken bits, no drama, only chips and in the end, the thing that I asked it to cut. I took a lot of attempts to cut aluminum back in December last year but all I got were broken bits all over the place. But at last, I have done it! DONE IT! Sorry I am too excited.
The feeds and speeds are nothing to write home about: 0.3mm DOC and 8mm/s feed for both slot and pocket; did not use any of the fancier cutting method. I can see some chatter happening but no biggy! I am too excited to do a proper measurement but seems like the parameters are within 0.5mm. YAAAAAAAAAY!
It did leave a bit of aluminum at the bottom (hair thick) so wasn’t hard to remove it. Note to myself: when DOC is too small, make sure to set the height as accurately as possible!
On the other hand, can someone tell me how to do a full dept finishing pass in estlcam? When I set finishing pass and select the tool (that I am already using to cut), seems like it puts in the finishing pass at the dept originally set for the tool. Do I have to set a different tool for finishing pass?
Thanks! So set a new tools for finishing pass with DOC thicker than the material itself? Do I select the material as the “finishing tool” while setting the cut or do I set a completely new path with the finishing tool (and material thickness)?
I might be doing things wrong but when I set up for finishing passes I set up cut 1 with the tolerance to 0.20mm (the yellow fields in the cut setup window). Then I set up a second cut, this time without any tolerance entered. Two full cuts, including however many Z steps that requires for each task.
