Serious question, has anyone else been told their speeds and feeds are too safe?

I had a guy from the tooling rep company watch me run a job on our Haas last year. He said, 'You're leaving money on the floor running that 6061 so slow. Your boss is paying for machine time, not babying the tool.' I mean, I was running a 1/2 inch end mill at 12k rpm and 75 ipm, which felt right. He pushed me to try 15k and 110 ipm with a more aggressive chip load. I was sure I'd break something, but the finish was actually cleaner and the cycle time dropped by almost 20%. It made me realize I'd gotten stuck in a comfort zone from my old shop where we ran everything super conservative. Now I do a test cut at higher parameters on every new material. What's the most someone has pushed you to change your basic cutting numbers?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_susan5d ago

That whole "leaving money on the floor" line gets thrown around a lot. Sure, maybe in a high volume production shop where seconds count, but for most of us doing short runs or one-offs, is it really that big a deal? A broken tool or a scrapped part from pushing too hard costs way more than the extra minute or two of cycle time. Sometimes safe just means reliable, and that has its own value. Not every shop needs to run everything at the absolute edge.

elizabeth_bailey265d agoMost Upvoted

Exactly, it's about knowing your own shop. I've seen guys chase numbers on a one-off job and wreck a setup that took hours. The math just doesn't work out. A reliable finish and hitting the delivery date is way better than saving three minutes and having to explain a crash to the boss.