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Am I the only one who ran the same feed and speed on 6061 for years before an old guy called me out
I have been running aluminum at the same numbers since I started, 4000 rpm and 40 ipm, and figured if it was not breaking tools it was fine. Then Gary, the guy who trained me back at the shop in Modesto, watched me run a part and asked why my finish looked like sandpaper. He walked me through chip thinning on my 3/4 inch end mill and I bumped the feed by almost double, and the finish came out like glass. Now I pull my hair out thinking about all the parts I ran slow for no reason. What dumb habit did you keep way too long just because nobody ever said anything?
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martinez.kim8d ago
Man I feel this in my bones. I ran a 1/2 inch carbide roughing end mill at like 3000 rpm and 25 ipm on 6061 for almost three years because that was what the guy who hired me wrote on a sticky note, and nobody ever said a word about it. Chips were tiny little dust piles and I just thought aluminum was supposed to sound like that. Then we got a new kid fresh out of tech school who asked why I was rubbing the cutter instead of cutting with it, and I wanted to crawl under the machine. Doubled the feed and suddenly chips were coming off in these fat curly ribbons and the part was done in half the time. The worst part is all the hours I lost standing there watching a slow pass, thinking I was being careful when I was really just wasting everybody's time. Gary sounds like a good dude for actually stopping to show you instead of just letting you keep running it wrong forever.
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