I’ve been eating 3.175mm single flute end mills for breakfast… I got some 10x package from xcan (AliExpress) accepting that they are cheap and potentially low quality, I’d not mind spending a little bit more and getting something better (EU) so open for recommendations also.
I mostly cut construction grade pine plywood (6, 9, 12mm) with 1mm DOC and 18mm/s…
After 3hrs of cut it starts to get quite noisy and somewhat screaming, especially on the finishing pass which I tend to do full depth.
In summary, I’m getting 3hrs cut with 1mm DOC and 18mm/s with a 3.175mm (1/8”) end mills, what do you guys get?
Try cutting deeper. Up to 1x the diameter of your endmill is a good goal. Right now you’re cooking the first 1mm of your end mills during your long cuts.
Every machine is different in terms of speed. But on my primo using 3.175mm bits I do:
1500mm/min 3mm depth (reliable for me. Have done 4mm) for 2d contours
And often do full depth adaptive clearing paths with 30% step over at similar speed. Often 10+mm deep.
I was struggling with mine and then I found my spindle bore was ‘off axis’ such that it wasn’t cutting reliably, so there can be a lot of factors…
What RPM are you running? What does the material that’s coming off look like, sawdust, curls of wood, chunks, any smoke or burning?
Are you mostly slotting for cutouts or are you doing some pocketing?
One thing here is that if you’re cutting 12mm plywood with 1mm DoC, the 1mm bit of end-mill that you’re using at the bottom is doing 12 passes, so a 1m cut at 1mm DoC is causing 12m worth of wear. It’s not ‘quite’ that simple, of course, but it seems to me to be a good rule of thumb.
So that 3 hours at 18mm/s is 10m of cut. If you were doing it at say 6mm DoC and 3mm/s you’d be clearing the same amount of material but using 6x more of your endmill. Moving slower means you’ll need to run lower RPM, which is the next step to check.