Heavy duty V-blocks - video

[wizard69]

Hi Toolmaker;

First; let me highlight that I'm not a machinist per say, more a jack of all trades working on automation equipment maintenance and build. All of the equipment we have in the shop is manual. We also work on a lot of optical equipment for inspection.

How tiny is tiny?

Around 2mm for end mills, but most of the work is larger. We seldom hog out material. I've acutely broken a few drill bits (mid 70's number drills too, those are often tiny too and sadly this often happens in aluminum. I realize that the problem with drilling is not pecking enough and clearing as when we do drill like this it is often rather deep in the aluminum. More RPM's out of the spindle might help but these are just old Bridgeports.

How many flutes?

The vast majority are 4 flute.

Materials?

plastics, ceramics, steel, aluminum, tool steels, stainless steels. A lot of our stuff is in clean rooms so there is a strong balance towards stainless steels and plastics.

Using right RPM? What condition is mill in?

RPM? Probably not, the head only has so many possible belt settings plus back gear. We actually have two mills both hand me downs from other departments, but they are very old. At least one of them though has had very little use as it came out of a research lab somewhere.

End milling, pocket or surface; profile, climb or conventional?

This is largely maintenance, modification and small device build, so all of the above are possible. We do try to do conventional milling when ever possible.

Coolant; flood, direct or air?

It depends as far as coolant goes, all manually applied though. Sometimes cutting oil, sometimes water soluble sprayed on.

Regardless size of machine, concern magnifies as cutter size decrease. All of them connect to chip evacuation, especially milling.

Yeah I'm learning this the hard way as I know for a fact that re-cutting chips has damaged more than a couple of end mills. Looking back I would have to say most of the broken end mills come from work hardening and the related issues with feed rate / RPM. This is compounded by sometimes not knowing the alloy and the heat treat condition. I've gotten better with this but the total lack of feedback, you get even with a 1/4" end mill in steel, is a big problem. There is no feel to be had.


As for CEE the other thing that differs is that he has customers actually rebuilding hyd cylinders. I really think the boss would laugh me out of the shop if I tried to rebuild an air cylinder or hyd cylinder off our machines. That would be considered a waste of time.or goofing off. The size of the stuff he works on is totally at the other end of the spectrum.