I’m busy prepping for my new CNC. I’ve been researching tooling. Application would be cutting plywood, mostly 3/4” thick but also some 1/2” and 1/4”. Not looking to maximize throughput although it would be nice to take advantage of the machine’s capabilities.
I’m curious what tool diameter people recommend for this. It seems like 1/4” might not take full advantage of the machine’s capabilities, 1/2” wastes a lot of material, so maybe 3/8”?
Personally I do like a 3/8 compression spiral when cutting plywood. You can push a 1/4" compression surprisingly hard, but those 3/8 ones are pretty stout.
I have used a roughing mill (1/4”) with an offset of 0.015”. Finishing passes with a compression mill 1/4”.
There are those “chip breaker” roughing mills you can really fly with. A lot of them I have used have left a pretty decent surface finish too…
We use 1/2” tooling because of the chip clearing advantages. The biggest bottleneck on our machine is the time to get the finished parts off the table, label everything, clean up and load the next sheet. I have found that 1/2” tooling leaves a lot less dust behind therefore reducing the table cleaning time.
EDIT: Material cost is usually less than 10% of the price of our work so it isn’t much of a concern to us if we sometimes need an extra sheet or 2.
Are you usually cutting sheet good?