Viesturs, I use Accupro solid carbide router cutters designed for machining plastic and aluminium. They come from www.mscindustrial.co.uk (which is a large American company and I think they will ship across Europe). Go to www.mscdirect.co.uk and search for MIG-30035C (on special offer right now, using product code DQMIG-30035C). They do sizes from 2mm diameter to 12mm diameter.
I have used the 2mm and 6mm diameter end mills and can recommend them. They have a high helix angle and the insides of the flutes are polished to a mirror finish, to help prevent the aluminium sticking to the flutes. I run them dry, or use some brushed on white spirits (turpentine) which stinks but works ok. I finish by climb milling, and the finish is excellent. Be warned, though; these are solid carbide and quite fragile. I have snapped quite a few, which is expensive. Regards, Marcus On 16 Feb 2013, at 15:32, Viesturs Lācis wrote: 2013/2/16 Peter Blodow <p.blo...@dreki.de>: > Viestors, > the endmill bit you showed is made of full carbide, a little oversized > for aluminum. Do You mean oversized in terms of diameter? I am going for 1 kW Kress spindle, it will handle that. > Alu tools generally have a steeper cutting angle and > higher pitch than tools for iron, that's all. Moreover, much higher > cutting speed is used in alu. I have some theoretical material to calculate cutting parameters, so I expect to get some practical experience in few weeks as well. > Be sure to use plenty of water based > fluid, I have been using pure tap water, too, in case there was no self > mixing cutting oil available. In university I found out that better than pure tap water would be mixing the water with soda (Na2CO3). Yes, I know about the need of coolant. As I already have been adviced before, mist coolant spray is recommended for aluminium, but this time my budget is very very tight. > I take it that you are on my side of the pond, since your name seems to > come from the Baltic. Yupp, that is correct! > So here is an European > distributor that I have made good experiences with: > http://www.fwt-gmbh.de/ Thank You, their pricing seems much better! -- Viesturs If you can't fix it, you don't own it. http://www.ifixit.com/Manifesto ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel - in partnership with Geeknet, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials, tech docs, whitepapers, evaluation guides, and opinion stories. Check out the most recent posts - join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel - in partnership with Geeknet, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials, tech docs, whitepapers, evaluation guides, and opinion stories. Check out the most recent posts - join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
