The Meticulous Z-Axis

It’s actually the opposite. The faster the bit is spinning over the ideal chipload, the more the flutes are rubbing against the work-surface and generating friction. This often overheats the tool and dulls the edges, but in extreme circumstances, can ignite the dust.

Life pro tip, keep a fire extinguisher on hand while cutting. It’s rare for a fire to start, but not unheard of.

I have a few of these guys I like to keep stocked in my tooling drawer. They’re very cost-effective as far as tooling goes. My only gripe with them is that the flute length is only 1/4". I prefer to have bits with a flute length that is greater than the thickness of the material being cut, so I can do a single, full-depth finish pass to clean up the stepping that otherwise shows up in the cut edges. That’s actually main reason #2 that I want to switch over the the single flute bits with the replaceable carbide. Reason #3 is that they are significantly cheaper in the long term (I believe I did out the math in the thread I linked above in post 125).

The more flutes on a bit, the faster it can travel since each flute can remove chips. A single-flute bit removes about half as much material as a two flute bit does in a single rotation. This means that with a two flute bit you need feed at a higher rate than you need to with a single bit. This has the advantage of faster cycle times on gantry-style machines that can move at 20,000 mm/min. On the Maslow, our maximum feedrate is 800 mm/min, and this is determined by the limitations of our hardware and the firmware’s lack of acceleration planning. As a result, single flute bits can operate at their preferred feed rate whereas two-flute bits will be moving too slowly. You can audibly tell when a bit is running below it’s required feed rate because it screams like a banshee. When a bit is at it’s optimum feed rate, you can only really hear the noise of it cutting.

For more information on the math behind feed rates, please refer to the first post in this thread I started, Increasing the Max Feedrate?, which oddly enough is the “Top Post” on my profile page.

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