has anyone used an 80mm spindle, and is 1.5KW too much? I could go with an 0.800KW 80mm spindle. I think the 53mm spindles are maxed at 0.4kw. I’d like to be able to make some 1/8" steel plates. They can take 3 days to cut, as long as they are accurate. I’m not sure if this will be rigid enough, although I am keeping it small.
David
I read of someone else milling stainless steel in another cnc machine with similar rigidity. They were small parts and took a while but they came out ok.
As far as I remember the spindle used was just under 1kw. I’ve been looking into it a bit and I’ll probably try it myself too once the machine is all setup properly and I have some experience with other materials.
I don’t think it’s something to be milling regularly on these machines anyway. You’ll likely end up taking very shallow bites out of the steel which is going to be harsh on you’re tooling. They’ll wear out prematurely because you’ll only be using a small portion of the usable length.
Definitely something worth trying though, I’d love to see how you get on if you try it.
I came across that recently too. Seems to be a similar method in fusion 360 as “adaptive clearing”.
It looks like it will allow much lighter loading of the tool and will probably be very useful for aluminium. Still not sure about steel though as I can’t find much info at all on people trying it with these types of machine.
Have you tried trochoidal milling?
We should know in about two weeks. I got the hardware kit yesterday, and I’ve got at least 36 hours of printing left. I’m going to order a 1.5kw spindle and VFD and see how it works out. I’m trying to talk myself out of buying a Precision Matthews 45M-CNC machine, but every day I end up looking at mills and end up there. At this point my main focus are chassis and suspension parts for a couple of reverse trike projects I have in mind. So far my designs only use flat plates for the fabricated parts, anything more complicated is easier to source from an exisitng bike or automobile. So a full CNC Mill is overkill, but if I had one I would have to make a 1/5 or 1/4 scale V8, just for fun.
David