I’m going to be switching between various structural plastics, aluminum, steel, and even wood from time to time. Plastics and wood I can cut without any coolant without a problem. For steel I imagine there’s no compromise there… flood coolant every time. For aluminum though, there appears to be some flexibility – sometimes coolant… sometimes not. I’m trying to understand the limits of cutting aluminum without coolant. Are there any rules of thumb on feed speed, depths of cut, mill types, lengths of time, etc.? Do these change for various grades of Aluminum?
I would say the opposite. You can cut steel dry but you cannot cut aluminum dry, it will heat up and clog the flutes of the endmill. Ive cut steel dry without issue i have not attempted aluminum. But i cut both with flood coolant now and havent had any issues.
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Really? That is surprising to me. I thought: harder metal, higher temps.
To an extent. More knowledgeable people will have to chime in but the chips should take away a lot of the heat, when steel heats up it doesnt get gummy but aluminum will get soft and stick in the flutes of the endmill. So its important to stop the material from heating up.
Some will say coolant reduces the life of carbide tooling as well. And it may, but flood coolant 1/4 inch 3 flute carbide at 60 ipm gets me a great surface finish on aluminum. I tried doing langmuires speeds and feeds chart with a 2 flute and the finish was ass and loud. It was an altin coated endmill as well. I tried uploading a video but for some reason it says it isnt formstted correctly
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I cut aluminum with a strong air blast to get chips away from the work. I’ll mix in a small amount of coolant droplets if I am working in a tight bore or other spot where chip evacuation is a problem. My machine doesn’t have flood coolant and that hasn’t been a problem.
I use a vacuum when cutting wood or plastic so that the fine dust doesn’t end up everywhere.
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