Shapeoko 3 CNC vs 1" Thick Aluminum - Making a Putter Head - Part 1
I have not tried to cut such thick aluminum on my Shapeoko 3 until now. I 3D printed a putter the other day for fun and decided it would be nice to make a metal putter head using the CNC. I had some bar stock 6061 aluminum that was 1 inch thick laying around so I drew up the design in Fusion 360 and used my Shapeoko 3 to machine the part. I used adaptive clearing for the majority of the part and learned a lot along that three hour deep dive into trying to get adaptive clearing to stop giving me tool crashing errors (turns out I did not have my stock clicked in geometry and I also needed to set the parameters for my tool travel in geometry as well). After drawing up the design I used carbide motion to do the job. I started with an engraving task using a 60 degree bit by Whiteside (Whiteside model 1540) then I put in my ¼ inch two flute Amana HSS (Amana HSS1633) and faced the material, bored out a hole, and went into a nearly hour long adaptive clearing at 75 inches per minute feed rate. My depth of cut was set to .04 in the adaptive clearing with an optimal load set to .1. I love the Amana high speed steel end mills. My first time trying to cut aluminum I used the stock speeds in Fusion and crashed a 50 dollar end mill. Since then I have been using the high speed steel end mills from Amana (usually costing under 10 dollars on amazon) and they have done a great job. I did not use any lubricant as I find sometimes that helps chips stick around. I put my vacuum on full blast which helped keep the chips away from the cutter. Because the stock was 1 inch thick I kept my dust boot up high which left the suction weak at the start, but I just paused it about every fifteen minutes to vacuum the chips in the area. I used the adaptive clearing without a finishing option because I wanted the steps in the design.