Mild stainless

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maddes054
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Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 6:57 pm

Mild stainless

Post by maddes054 »

What bit do I use to work on metal ?

Rando
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Re: Mild stainless

Post by Rando »

The right ones?

When you move from wood, where a lot of people start with router bits that have carbide cutting edges welded-on, you move into solid-carbide end-mills.

The number and variety of these is immense. Truly immense. Hundreds of name-brand manufacturers making things called "corncob roughers", "spoon bits" and "backside boring bars".

What kinds of metal are you considering moving into? Just stainless? Are you familiar with working in metals already?

What kinds of things are you looking to make? Decorative etchings? Structural steel bridges?

The options are too many to be able to answer your question without further clarification of your intent.

I'm actually not trying to be flippant here. I work on the Sharks in metal every single day, cutting blocks of Aluminum. Just yesterday I made some Printed Circuit Boards. Technically, since Copper is a metal.... Anyway, you get the idea. The range of difficulty and "stuff" you have to do to make some serious metal PARTS of dimensional accuracy is quite a ways beyond working in wood as the Sharks were intended. Not impossible by any means, but there are compromises over what some would consider standard machining practice.

I've gotten reasonably good enough that at their last trade show, NWA displayed a bunch of metal parts I make on my Shark HD2+ machine.

Lest I bore you with my normally-overlong explanations and lists, below are a couple pix of the stuff that I use to work in metal. It's rather extensive.
A bit of stuff needed to do metals...
A bit of stuff needed to do metals...
(White dusting is from PCB material)
(White dusting is from PCB material)
One way or another, unless you're doing nothing more than engraving on stainless sheet, if you REALLY want to start working in metals, you will need to become expert at feeds-and-speeds, sometimes just F&S. If you don't, you'll break bits and waste material all day long for months on end...until you accept that you need calculational help.

Regards,

Thom
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ThomR.com Creative tools and photographic art
A proud member of the Pacific Northwest CNC Club (now on Facebook)

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