Do yourself a solid and get the single flute short endmills from the v1 shop next time you place an order if you’re going to use 1/8. You can also find them on eBay…Kyocera is the brand. They are absolute tanks. When i started learning, i could weld chips to them, bury them in aluminum, and stall out the steppers,peel the aluminum out of the flutes with pliers and send it back to work like nothing happened. Also abused some on mild steel for a while.
I found that gwizard was a bit complex for anything I wanted to do, or maybe I was too lazy to learn it.
For a one off job, all I care about is finishing, and not TOO slow (did I get that from Jeff? I forget). Definitely doesn’t need to be optimized. And if I’m doing enough jobs that i need to optimize, i can work up to it.
I’ve had something like 6 or 7 v1 cnc builds, and cut aluminum with varying degrees of success on all of them. When I’m dialing it in now, i start with 0.001 in/tooth at full rip (so 27ipm with my 611 at 27k rpm and that single flute), at about 0.04"DOC. Increase the feed rate until I get uncomfortable, then start going deeper until i get problems and back off a little. This is backwards from wood and mdf where deeper is better, because of the evacuation importance Paul mentioned.
Avoid slotting when you can, but where you have to try to create an entry point by drilling or at least boring, take shallower passes, and add a rough pass (so at least two total on each depth) for the slot to get extra room for clearance. I can usually get about 1/8 deep on a 1/8 endmill before i need to plan this extra clearance.
Here is a video of some clamps i cut out of 1/4in aluminum on a smaller, more rigid, primo.
