Pro/Forums - New Design: Ww+rotor

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Zymrgy is giving good advice here.

Working manually with 1mm end-mills is hard. Far better to go very shallow with each pass, than to try and cut deep, which will just result in too much heat, swarf, and snapped bits.

It'll take you forever to cut it, and then think about how much harder copper is to work with, and then you'll know why most machinists I talked to winced when I mentioned cutting copper with 1mm end-mills. It can be done, but using very high RPM's, shallow passes and slow feed-rates, and it takes a long time.

or you can just use slit saws and be done in 20 mins :)

Have you considered getting a WW from Dtek and modding it?

It might even work out cheaper, considering all the end mills.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zymrgy

unfortunatly, the nature behind your setup is that you are going to wind up breaking a few (lots) endmills. While alum is a very forgiving material to cut, small endmills are not. About all I can suggest is to wind up you drill press as fast as it can go (RPM) & try to control your depth of cut to very small cuts. I am talking like .01" (.25mm). this helps a few things...heat does not build up as fast & the chips clear out easier (much smaller chips) Feed the bit through the piece as slow as you can stand to turn your handle. Try & keep the chips flush out from the cut as best as you can. It might take forever & a year to cut 1 channel, but the walls will be vertical & your bit should hold up longer. For cutting fluid on both alum & copper, try kerosene. really. The stuff works better than anything I have ever seen on alum, plus you get to inhale the fumes as a bonus . Try using a squirt type oil can & flood the shit out of the part with the kerosene, this should help flush the chips & keep the heat from building up also.

thankx for the help man, i think i was talking to large depth of cut, that's why i smashed 3 endmills, but i know that 2 of them were smashed with my own mistakes, one of them i didn't even start to mill with it caused i inserted in the the wrong place and it smashed immediately :(

hope to continue this tomorrow

Quote:

Originally posted by GTA
Have you considered getting a WW from Dtek and modding it?

It might even work out cheaper, considering all the end mills.

i would like to do it myself, I would be much more happy with my work :)

Oh, of course, I totally understand that :) its much more fun and rewarding when you make the whole thing yourself.

The only problem I can see is that you will have serious problems making decent microchannels, in copper, with a drill-press and an X-Y table. Its hard enough in aluminium, as you're finding out, copper is several times tougher to work with.

The modded WW is something I'd definatly consider doing myself, when they finally get the Dtek block over in the UK.

Until then, got my happy little circular block running very nice :)

Good luck to you.

iono... cutting slow can have it's disadvantages, as i found out. I'm trying to cut some fins with a 1/16" bit, first I cut about 2-3 mm deep, and cut fairly quickly, and got through 6 fins before it broke. I read this post, and tried cutting slower. I cut about .25 mm deep, at about .05mm / second accross.I got through 2 fins (cutting them another 2 mm deep each) before it got too dull.

So basically you want to cut as quickly as you can without them breaking to get the most out of the bits. I've pretty much had enough of endmills, and am going to go with dremel diamond cutoff wheels. 6 for $10, and a lot quicker.