Chinese 3040T Arrives

[jimbo_cnc]

Well its been 6 months since I received the 3040 cnc machine and it has been running between 7 and 10 hours a week cutting mostly hard woods and I did cut one aluminium bracke.....s

Hi Gregor, what speed/depth of cut have you been using for the phenolic board? Have you tried cutting nylon or delrin?

I'm trying to work out if one of these chinese machines will make the plastic parts I want.

What size tool would I use for bulk material removal?

[Gregor]

Hi jimbowley
my spindle on my machine only goes up to 8000, the cut depth is 0.8mm and it cuts the phenolic board pretty good, I did cut some plastic with it and it melted the plastic but I found if a used a little bit of wd40 it was fine I haven't used it on delrin. The end mill I mostly use is 1.5mm but have used 3mm for removing material. I am sure other members will give you better advice on what to try as I am really only a beginner.

[JAZZCNC]

What size tool would I use for bulk material removal?

The largest you can fit in the spindle.! . . . . . . With cutting plastic like Gregor mentions heat will be the problem but this is just a function of chip load and finding the best setup that suits machine/material/cutter unfortunatly it's not an exact science and very M/M/C dependant. Often when people are melting they are cutting to shallow or too slow and with RPM too high or some combination of all three.
If you use the correct type of cutter with a decent spindle and 10-12mm cutter then there's no reason why you shouldn't rough out 16mm nylon in 3 passes. One problem with nylon is that it can wrap around the tool so having air blowing helps clear this and also gives a slightly better finish. Taking deeper cuts makes bigger chips and this also helps but means going slower so soem experimenting is needed to find best balance.