Question Milling steel.

Hi,

I'm currently making a removable vacuum adapter to fit my industrial VFD spindle, and would prefer to mill holes and slots on the Stepcraft via Cut2D generated profile rather than piecemeal on my mini-mill. The material is 1/16" mild steel sheet - has anyone pushed the boat out and tried steel yet.

I would guess the cutting depth would need to be very modest, say .01" max, and the milling speeddown below 30" /minute. Would a 3mm carbide cutter be suitable or should I stick with an HSS end mill?

Guidance would be much appreciated as I am pretty adept at breaking tools!!

Peter

Found one post here in German: Steel

To summerize:
- using cheap end-mills he needed 15-22 tools per work-piece (sorotec)
- then he tried one for 9,-Euro and it was fine!

Have checked at Sorotec and found those from "Datron": end-mill

... but expensive...

- also he said: needs a lot of cooling with oil spray

Maybe translate the rest with "google translate"...

Hi Hartmut,

Thanks for the link to the guy machining steel parts - on thinking about it again, I'm concerned now that the cutting side loads might cause damage to the aluminium tracks and or rollers, so maybe it would be prudent to revert to the mini - mill instead.

My mill is fitted with DRO's on all axes, so getting the requisite accuracy would not be a problem. Tools would then be standard HSS twist drills and centre drills rather than expensive end mills.

The one thing I dont want to do is risk damage which might impair the engraving of fine printed circuit board tracks.

Regards,

Peter