Freesteel Blog » Incompetent hard metal machining

Incompetent hard metal machining

Friday, June 17th, 2016 at 1:48 pm Written by:

What was that horrible noise coming out of the closet at DoESLiverpool for about three days?

I was attempting to machine down one of these hold-down clamps so it could fit the 70mm wide type 2 vice I’d bought recently.

My earlier attempts to clamp the vice down on two points failed when the bolts rattled loose and the whole thing started being dragged back and forth across the table by the milling cutter. I decided was going to require at least four points of attachment to work, and these neat little clamps looked just the right shape — except for the problem of being slightly too tall.

(That current configuration in the picture was an idea Andy came up with at the last minute when trying to solve this problem.)

Andy had tried to skim them down on his lathe and told me that the metal was too hard. But I was determined to prove that anything could be done if you took little enough cuts. In this case it was steps of 0.1mm per layer and 0.5mm across

At 8000rpm there were sparks. These didn’t happen at 6000rpm. I was running with a 5mm 2fluke flat bottomed tiain-coated carbide tool. Furthermore, the conventional milling sounded marginally less nasty than the climb milling passes. I’m surprised nothing broke, though I don’t have the experience to tell whether a tool has worn out or not.

The result was pretty crap. Instead of performing some clean cutting, it seems like some of the metal was simply bashed flat and pushed out to form a lip around the face.
flatcut
I didn’t know that metal would have the propensity to produce this result when undergoing milling.

It’s not a factor accounted for any software I’ve heard of.

I’ve written many algorithms that detect the horizontal flat faces of a part and create toolpaths to skim them out, but no one has ever requested a subsequent pass just below each open edge to clean off the burr left over.

Sadly, there won’t be any more machining for at least six weeks as I’ll be in a rainy campsite in Austria waiting for the chance to fly. At least this will give me lots of time to try and write some useful code when I’m not washing pans or carrying rope and other provisions for the cavers.

1 Comment

  • 1. Graeme Nisbet replies at 20th June 2016, 8:21 am :

    I know your machines not the most rigid in the world, but slow the speed down easily half it. You should always climb mill with carbide. Leave the conventional milling to old manual mills with acres of backlash.

    As for the big rags round the edges we either go round with a chamfer tool or file them off.

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