Hi Ash, (This is reply of email sent to me by ash for sake of others)

Oh man you’ve asked a question now.!! . . . One I can’t answer properly.?

Well first when they say depends on machine they don’t mean what electronics your using or the speed it can travel at. Most machines can travel faster than they can cut at. It’s more to do with Strength and stiffness along with spindle power. Stronger machine can cut deeper and still give decent finish provided it’s got enough spindle power.

How fast you can cut depends on many variables but machine strength and spindle power play big part. The truth is cutting is trade off between speed and quality. Having both means very strong machine. Which in turn means heavy strong materials. Which in turn means high quality and powerful components like servos. Then you have Spindle power.?
To cut deep not only means strong machine it requires lots of Torque in the spindle. Quality finish often requires high spindle speed and Spindle with high torque and High rpm are very expensive.

What I’m trying to say is while £7k seems lot of money when it comes to High speeds and High quality then it’s nothing really. The spindle alone could eat half that.!! Servos required for high feeds will be another 2K and it goes on.!
So need to be realistic and realise that you will have a limit and for high feeds then your machine will be some of that limit.

Then you have tooling and material combo that gets thrown into the mix.? Material type as big influence on cutting speed, each having there own parameters and preferred feeds/speeds.
Cutter type material it’s made from and number of flutes also play another big part. Cutter materials like Carbide can be run much harder or deeper but only if the Spindle and Machine are man enough. HSS tooling is more forgiving on machine but can’t cut so fast or deep and often needs lower spindle RPM which is where Spindle torque comes into play. On spindles like WC 2.2Kw when run slow there isn’t lots of torque available. So to combat this you have to cut shallower or much slower. Often both which restrict total cycle time.

These are just a few of the parameters that dictate feeds & speeds. Machine strength, spindle power, material, Cutter flutes, cutter material, Cutter length, chip clearing, lubrication all these play part in the final
feeds n speeds.
So this is why I or no one else can't give you exact feeds & speeds. Unfortunately lot of it is trial and error.

Cheers
Dean.