A recent addition to the shop, was one of those small mills.
Firstly I appologise for putting milling cutters in a drill chuck. I know its bad, but I haven't sourced a proper chuck yet. Trouble is after my Wombling exploits, I have plenty Clarkson screwed chank cutters, but have yet to find a Clarkson Autolock for MT3. One disadvantage of the mini-mill's popularity is that accessories with an MT3 taper are very popular and are a bit hard to find.
As you can see from the chips , I have tried milling, with not a lot of success I must say. I started with some T nuts that came from bigger machines. I managed to trim them down to fit, but not a very clean cut. I had more luck with the flycutter.
I then put a block of what I think is straight aluminium in the vice, put a slot drill in, went down about 1/4" and then wound the Y handle out to mill a slot. I didn't lock the X axis as I was going to move in this direction later. The cutter looked sharp, and drilled the hole easily enough, but when I started to move out, the chips were more like grains, than chips of Aluminium. I increased feed, the motor complained and stalled. I changed to low gear, started again, the chips looks more like you would expect, and moved the cutter about 25mm, then changed to the X axis and brought the cutter out the side. I skimmed the surface after with the flycutter to clean it up.
As you can see the cut is not straight, and its wobbling from side to side.
The cutter is not happy either.
I am amazed, an HSS cutter being worn away by what I think is aluminium. I had a 45deg cutter and took some small cuts from the side, which worked OK, the cutter is still sharp, and the cut is clean.
Am I cutting too slow ?. I had the mill on slow ratio, dial about at 8 oclock.
I guess I need to learn about Speeds and Feeds ( before I ruin all my cutters). Any recomendations for good books ?.
Ken
