What Bit?
I broke my first bit yesterday trying to do a profile cut. It was a weird one, and I think what happened was that the bit was pulled down into the workpiece, possibly due to bad feeds and speeds or because I was using Climb cutting direction, or a combination of the two. The bit was a long (1" cutting depth) 1/8" upcut bit and the workpiece was 20mm thick pine.
Was I asking too much of a 1/8" bit anyway, or would you have no hesitation using such a bit to cut through something like this? Now that I've had time to reflect on it, it seems logical to me that an upcut bit would be more likely to get pulled down into a workpiece, and I hear that using a Climb direction in a soft wood is also more likely to pull the bit into the workpiece.
Should I be looking totally at my feeds and speeds to find the problem or should I consider that the bit was unsuitable for the task?
This is the scene of the accident btw - as I said, this should have been a profile cut... cutting through the whole piece in 7 or 8 passes. This was the first pass, and it looked like it started out okay, and then went rapidly downhill (literally!). I've put in my bit into OnlyCNC's with machine data, and it does appear that my feeds and speeds were way off, but still - should this have happened on the first pass if it entered the wood okay?
Comments
Does your router have stepper motors , do you have ball screws for movement or do you have little cogs that use a set screw to hold it in place, was your bit tight in the collet, what was your step down in your profile toolpath. No need to say words just check if things are tight, check to see if you lost a step (if it jumped a cog) if the set screw is tight (if you have one of those babies make sure you use lock tight (the blue stuff will work fine). Looks like you were taking about .100" (I use standard measurements not metric). Make sure you tighten the collet very well, fi you don't it could be sucked down.
mike
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