When cutting glued-up beech wood at 3000mm/min, 6mm DOC, 6mm 2-flute at 16000rpm, I lost a lot of steps. According to the Sorotec calculator, that was too fast, but even at 24000rpm I had to go down to 2000mm/min.
Now I think the culprit might be the endmill, it’s 3 years old and did a fair bit of cutting.
Do you think it’s done for, looking at these pictures?
If I drag the cutting edge over a piece of paper, it doesn’t cut it, just leaves a groove.
I think it’s still ok for roughing - if you crank up the revs you’ll get lovely black line around the edge as though it’s been lasered.
Actually, there must be a way of honing mills…
Is your edge missing some pieces? The easiest way to know for sure it grab a new one, and do a side by side cut, I bet your 3 year old is done for. Mine never last that long.
Also that is a pretty intersting endmill it seems to be in betwean an upcut and a straight.
No, you are right. I took the photos and was pretty sure it was gone. Basically impossible to see with the naked eye, but pictures show it. Gonna buy one of those rainbow thingies, see if they last longer. 
And without hitting them with a monkey wrench. Or cutting a screw…
I got one of those cheap Vevor microscopes when someone posted the link on the forum. I’ve started looking at mine on there and it’s crazy what still looks good to the naked eye but is horrible when you put it under the scope lol
so put 2 together in a drawer and see what happens!!!
Be careful because no edge is perfect. You would be chasing zeroes to look at it in a microscope.
Yeah if its real minor I keep it around, but some are 
I will try and take some pics next time I inspect any
I was kind of bummed because of it being done for, but I also really didn’t know what to expect. I have exchanged only one endmill in the whole time, one of those burr endmills I have been using for ages and broke 2 small aluminium endmills as well as some 1.5mm ones. But besides that I haven’t had to buy a new one because one was blunt.
Then I thought about the prices of PLA etc. 50€ for 2kgs Prusament, that’s nearly double the price of a decent 6mm endmill (and 50€ is basically the cheapest you can get there, buying 2kg). All the “normal” colours cost the same as an endmill. That’s what made me realize that the endmills are definitely to be seen as expendables.
Good thing I stopped smoking weed 20 years ago or I would not have had enough money for my hobby… 
I feel like I was swapping endmills every ~10 hours on the MDF cuts? I easily could have gone longer but new ones sounded clearly better on the same cuts. For me $5 on an endmill is far better than wasting two hours on a cut and breaking an endmill.
