Mahogany Feed Rate

[Todd Wertz]

Hi All, I'm about to cut a pattern out of Mahogany and need some advise. I need to know a spindle speed and feed rate for a .25" 4 Flute Ball endmill. This will just be used for finish passes. It will be taking off 0.02.

Thanks

Todd

[Jack Neelands™]

check out this link

 

http://www.woodweb.com/knowledge_base/CNCM...ing_Curved.html

 

 

Advice on bit choice, feed speeds, RPMs, and pre-roughing blanks. May 22, 2006

Question

We have a customer that wants us to machine a quantity of African mahogany. Looking for info about feeds, speeds, tooling, milling, etc. We will be using an AXYS table with vacuum hold down.

 

Forum Responses

(CNC Forum)

From contributor J:

Don't be afraid of African. I run the same as most other hardwood (white oak, genuine mahogany, cherry). I suppose it depends on what you are doing to material. Cutting, shaping, mortising?

 

 

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From the original questioner:

We are a Corian shop, not a wood shop, so we are pretty green about cutting wood. The pieces will be 1 1/2" thick with 24" arcs for window jambs. They will then be glued up to 7 1/2" thick by customer. There will be 200 pieces or more. Tried a sample with our 2 flute spiral bit, but I don't see that lasting long at all. It was seaming from the beginning at .5" deep pass, 150 ipm.,18000 rpms conventional cut.

 

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From contributor J:

I use .5" diameter 2 flute 15,000rpm 170 ipm but only .25" deep pass. You should be able to push feed to 200ipm depending on your hold down capabilities.

 

 

I would cut your speed in half and go from there with the same feed rate

[mowens]

For a ballnose that small, is 4 flute a good choice? We run 2 flute .25 and .375 ballnose in various types of wood including mahogany. We run about 18000 rpm and around 200 ipm.

[Tom Dorgan from American Precision]

+1 Mowens. The 4 flute will create too small of a chip load to work efficiently for my money. Need a 2 flute and it will work fine. I run 24000 RPM because I can but 18000 will work fine if that is all you got.

[Todd Wertz]

I tried a 2 flute upcut ball, however, it gouged really bad last time I used it.

[Todd Wertz]

Mowens, How deep are you cutting at 200 ipm?

[mowens]

We use a down spiral with .015-.025 DOC, usually kellering a radius.

[Trevor Bailey]

I like to use 3 flute coarse roughers. I have run them on mills at 8k-10k removing 1" or more per depth at 150-300 inches per minute and have never really seen any splintering unless there was already stress in the wood.

 

On a HAAS SS, I cut a fully crowned guitar body with a 3 flute, 3/8 rougher at 10k going 400 ipm and the body came out beautiful.

 

These end mills are just standard bits. For deep pocketing, I use a flat 3 flute rougher and finish with a flat, 3 flute downcut highspeed bit.