Hi, Im dan

I'm a CAD Engineer by day, and a self taught machinist by night. Two years ago I bought a second hand StoneyCNC MegaMill, which has been great. I've got to grips with the basics of programming with Fusion 360. Im now fairly confident cutting aluminium, but I want to take it to the next level - thats why im here.

I tend to program very conservatively, using known recipes borrowed from internet research, small cutters (6mm) and the parts ive made so far have been small flanges and brackets. I got big ideas tho, the cutting area on the machine is huge for its class, but I need to cut faster and the complexity and time it takes to generate toolpaths in fusion is getting out of hand.

The machine has a Teknomotor 2kw spindle, it operates best between 12000-24000 and has er25 collet so goes up to 16mm tooling
The bed moves at up to 4000mm/min - I need to do some tests, but in most situations i don't see it get that high, as i don't think it accelerates fast enough. Most of the things i machine are more organic shapes, rather than straight sided.
Its all controlled through UCCNC, and ive just got a fogbuster too, to help when I ramp everything up.

Something that would help massively is if I could use that 16mm capacity and a decent tool and recipe to hog out material, I've no idea what will work tho, and tooling gets expensive at that size.

Dan