I’m pretty excited about this! I’ve had my AVID PRO 4896 for almost 2 years and decided to try some aluminum plate 6061-T651 and I’m IMPRESSED. Here are 2 video links of me milling Aluminum. I’m going to also add 3 pictures to this message of a milled 1/2” plate with chamfered edges. 1 picture of cast iron milling as well. It cut like butter !
Not bad! What are you using for lube/coolant there?
Awesome! Please keep sharing!!
These machines do really well at aluminum. This is something I did today on my Benchtop:
I made this the other day:
I used a tiny little 1/16th bit on the lettering, I should have run it faster.
IPA mist is the key
DISCLAIMER
I have ZERO experience milling metals or alloys! I basically purchased some HDPE boards with varying thicknesses and Flattened both sides the put a recess close to the edge like a cutting board that’s designed to catch juices. Then i used the painters tape on both sides and superglue to hold the aluminum down on the table. this is my first experience with Aluminum on a CNC.
Check out the second video. For cutting oil or lube or whatever I just collected some random stuff around my shop and mixed a little of this and that in a spray bottle then sprayed it on a cheap paint brush.
send me or post about your misting system, I need to get something myself
Right now I’m running a Lube Cube from SST tools:
The canister they ship them with is acrylic and cannot stand up to alcohol so I swapped it for one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003VT7ERY
There are certainly cheaper ways to do this. An Amazon search of coolant misters will show you a whole bunch. At the end of the day blowing some chips off with air and keeping things lubricated with alcohol will help immensely.
Another quick aluminum task I did the other day:
I had these motor couplers that I needed to bore out. They were cheap ones so the hole that was drilled through them wasn’t centered in the body. This doesn’t matter for the application, but it meant that I couldn’t put them in a lathe and bore them out “properly” so I did it this way.
Pretty happy with the result!
