Me Again - Feedrate/Depth Per Pass

So I have yet to really come close to even dialing my feedrate.

for example, I am cutting an outline of a Denver Bronco logo out of 1/2 plywood… I am at almost two hours on the cut.

I have it set at 400mm/m with a depth per pass .50 on a 1/4 endmill… I am not sure really how much I should be cutting each pass and again I am using a 500w spindle vs the DW660 due to the extreme noise the DW660 puts out.

the max rpm on the spindle is 12k so I am not sure how far to push the feedrate and the depth per pass…

Thoughts?

Deeper.

Instead of jumping straight into projects do some test cuts lots of them, I do them every time I switch materials to find out if my bits are still sharp etc.

Do test cuts until it is obviously to much. Once you learn the sounds it becomes very clear if you can go deeper/faster or not.

Every single machine is so very different no one here can tell you what will work for your machine.

Watch some videos look at the settings. I like to cut at about 12-15mm/s I leave than number alone and just increase the depth of cut until I get chatter then back off. I tend to run my spindle at about 75-80 speed, that way if I do run into odd sounds I can speed up or slow down, I favor this over feed rate multipliers as I feel the accelerations don’t scale well.