The speed and feed charts in the manual are just a starting point

I keep seeing guys on here and in the shop running their end mills exactly at the numbers in the book and wondering why they get chatter or crap surface finish. Last job I had was cutting 304 stainless on a Haas VF-2, book said 350 SFM and .002 IPT. That thing sounded like a dying cat and the parts came out rough. I bumped it up to 500 SFM and dropped the feed a hair, night and day difference. The book numbers are for a perfect world with rigid setups and new tooling, not a machine that's been running 8 years. I've been doing this 12 years and I learned quick that you gotta listen to the cut and adjust from there. How many of you just take the book values and run with them?

2 comments

2 Comments

alex_hall914d ago

Yeah I used to stick to the book until I tried bumping speeds and realized how wrong I was.

fiona_clark4d ago

My first few tries I kept everything at 70% infill and 50mm/s because I thought going faster would ruin the print. Took a buddy showing me his vase mode print at 120mm/s with zero stringing to finally make me try it. Now I run most stuff at 80mm/s with 15% infill and honestly the quality is barely different. Wish I started experimenting earlier instead of wasting all that time and filament on unnecessary settings.