What I was referring to was machining at (very) high speeds, rather than trochoidal or adaptive toolpaths. It seems that if you keep winding up the surface speeds way above where we normally work, the input power starts to come down quite noticeably. Very few of our machines would be capable of operating in that region but I wondered if that was what Kitwn was talking about, as he has a router that presumably can operate at high spindle speeds. We seem to be talking surface speeds in the region of 1000m/min https://www.ctemag.com/news/articles...peed-machining

m_c, as you say, the use of "HSM" is very fuzzy. Companies like Autodesk / HSMWorks merely(!) mean adaptive or trochoidal. Even so, they have been a revelation, particularly when applied to older machines which can now achieve impressive MRRs the manufacturers never would have expected to see.

I might be wrong but my understanding is that the adaptive clearing algorithm was devised by a couple of guys in Liverpool. They seem to have missed out on the rewards from such a widely adapted and successful concept. https://www.freesteel.co.uk/wpblog/frontpage/