Single flute carbide cutters

[AdCNC]

Another thing that i you need to pay attention to is the resonance, these cutters can give off a "screaming sound" this is bad as what you are hearing is the cutter resonating. this will almost definitely cause the cutter to fail. Id experiment like you say keep you feed the same 2.5M/M and reduce or increase you RPM until the screaming goes, you should hear a nice cutting sound, I if get 5 mins ill do a vid for you.

[Jonathan]

I think I would describe the sound as 'screaming' ... not the normal sort of 'hissing' sound. I'll experiment tomorrow and do a vid...I bought a heap of cutters from toolstation yesterday, 3 each of 6mm, 1/4", 8mm and 10mm so plenty to experiment with though I'd prefer not to break them all! Before I made the recent changes to the router I can't remember ever breaking a cutter ... it was just too slow. I can use much more than 2.5m/min if neccecary - I tried a 1/2" cutter yesterday cutting 1/2" deep and it was fine at 6m/min.

[Robin Hewitt]

I bought a couple of these cutters in 2 and 3mm from J & L to try with aluminium. Haven't spun one up yet, but I reckoned that half fishtail point should be good for a fine horizontal finish. Wonder how it copes with a vertical plunge, I always prefer to add some horizontal movement when I sink a fishtail, but that might just be my poor old brain seeing problems that do not exist :whistling:

[Jonathan]

I'm thinking that they may not be as effective as a 2-flute cutter at plunging since with only one flute cutting (instead of one and a bit) the direction of the resultant force in the X/Y plane is going round in circles. Whereas with 2-flute I imagine the the forces are almost equal, and they are opposite ... so they should at least partially cancel out. That does not take into account swarf ejection though...

We used carbide 2-flute cutters (2mm and up) on the little router at school all the time with various plastics. They lasted a long time.