Newby needs help

[Gregor]

Hi
I have had some great advice on this forum about cad and cam software, With my Chinese 3040 cnc arriving on Wednesday or Thursday I need some advice on end mills,I hope to be cutting hardwood like oak 3mm to 4mm thick and cutting pockets in aluminium ,any advice on what sort of end mills I should use would be appreciated and if you have links to were to buy them.the collet is er11 3.17 mm
Thanks

[Lee Roberts]

Hi Gregor,

I think in general people experiment and find out what cutters work best for them or their machine. I believe when it comes to this kind of tooling, you get what you pay for, though there have been quite reasonable results from less costly cutters.

There is a nice post by Steve showing the results from cutting aluminium with coolant and a selection of 5 different cutters located in his build log here: My Build - I blame you lot for this....!

You do also have the option when working with wood to use standard router bits; they also work for aluminium as well so I’ve read. The ER11 collect on your machine may impose some limitations on what size cutters you can choose however.

.Me