Beautiful Flycutting

[Crusty]

Because I generally prefer to mill large areas using a flycutter, today I stumbled across an amazing technique. Unknown to me, the head on my mill was out of perpendicular to the table (less than a ½ degree though) and as I fed a part into the cutter I noticed that the trailing cut was a little bit deeper than the leading cut and as I studied it I also noticed that the surface left by the flycutter was really nice, smooth, uniform and showing a rainbow effect.

Thinking through all of this I realized that my mill head wasn't square to the table, making the flycutter point a little deeper on one side than on the other and if the material is fed so that the deepest point takes the last cut two things happen 1. the leading cut takes out the bulk of the material and the trailing cut is a light skim pass and 2. since the skim pass is a light cut it leaves a very nice finish to the surface just milled.

I'm going to be intentionally setting my mill head sightly out of square when I flycut from now on. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then.