Carbon Fibre Composite Sheet Test Cut

[magicniner]

Cut with a 1/8" end-mill using a profile cutting feature.
I was very conservative with depth of cut in the hope that I'd avoid and delamination or tearing and get a neat finish on the edges and that seemed to work.
I added a small chamfer manually with a diamond honing block.

[njhussey]

I'm looking at cutting CF sheet for RC aeroplane bits (control horns etc...) and was going to use diamond burrs or PCB cutters as those seem to be the recommended tools....but if a standard end mill works might give it a go :)

[magicniner]

Neil,
I used single flute, (partly because I have a lot in stock in a variety of sizes and partly because they're easier to re-grind than a drill bit) so far 0.2mm depth per pass, my initial speeds & feeds were erroneous as I was actually feeding 4x the advance per flute I intended with no appreciable load on the cutter,
Regards,
Nick

[Boyan Silyavski]

hi Nick,
did you use tabs or tape and glue?

[magicniner]

hi Nick,
did you use tabs or tape and glue?

Boyan,
Because I was only cutting 0.2mm per pass (which ought to keep cutting forces low) I used double sided tape to hold the carbon fibre composite down to a sacrificial 2mm acrylic sheet, which was in turn held down to an aluminium tooling plate with double sided tape,
Regards,
Nick

[magicniner]

Here's the bits in which the test cut produces the internal aperture, I don't know what I'll do with the cut outs but they're so cute I can't put them in the bin just yet ;-)