smallest cutter for aluminium sheet?

Hi,

We have some fine detail design to do for some prototype scientific equipment. This needs some smallish pockets milled out of some 6mm sheet about 200x200mm total area. The minimum feature size is about 1mm, but to fit it all in we would like to use some smallish cutters. I read about people doing detail work in oak using three passes with the last using a 0.5mm ball nose. We probably don't need anything quite that small, but what's the likelihood of getting our designs cut on a commercial basis with a 1-2mm cutter?

Alan

Hi Alan

In my experience, I have worked on projects that involve using cutters as small as 0.4mm ball noses, for production runs of 2,400-off components.

Aluminium is very forgiving. Running on a machine with a 10,000 or 12,000 rpm spindle... a 0.5mm ball nose at 10,000 amp & ~120mm/min, cut depth 0.2mm will run no issues.

>>> In my experience, I have worked on projects that involve using cutters as small as 0.4mm ball noses, for production runs of 2,400-off components.

Wowee that's impressive,

Do you have any ballparks of where the cost hikes as the cutters get small (4mm?, 1mm?) or is just it a gradual thing?

Do you have a similar sense of when the feature size dictates you move to edm?

Thanks, Alan

Hi Alan

I have used cutters from a wide range of different suppliers. Price hikes are all dependant on supplier! There is a company (that I cant recall off the top of my head) that specialise in "micro cutters". They don't go below 0.3mm BN tho.

Getting a 0.4BN into a slot is easy... its the depth of the slot that really makes things difficult! I would say if the slot was deeper than 2.25 times the diameter of the cutter then you should start investigating other methods of manufacture, like EDM.

Hope this helps.