Vertical Mill Tutorial 3 : First chips!

hello Internet my name is Quinn and this is blondie hacks this is mil skills a series of quick videos on getting started with your vertical mill for the fundamentals of machining in general check out my lathe skills series but if you've just bought a mill then this is the series for you this is episode 3 making chips let's dive in so last time on mill skills we talked all about how to tram your head and how to install and indicate your vise and if you haven't done that yet you definitely need to go back and watch that because we also talked about the physics of vices and the various important relationships in the body of the vise and how those can affect your work all right all right enough science let's say I get to what you really want to talk about which is the cutters now milling cutters are really where all the technology in the vertical mill is the mechanics of the mill itself are the same as the lathe it's suspended on some slides and you know that's 100 and something year old technology but n mills are amazing and they are the reason that the vertical mill came along relatively late in the machining technology curve you know before vertical Mills we had things like planers and shapers for making flat and square stuff and their single point cutting tools similar to the lathe you know they have creative ways of moving a single point cutter across the work or moving in the case of a planer the work under a single point cutter just like the lathe does but the the advent of the technology to make multi-point cutters like these guys are what made the vertical mill possible so I've got them sorted here left to right in what is let's face it the order that you're going to buy them all the way on the left here is your standard set of cheap import and mills and they are high speed steel and they are very tempting because you get a set of like six of them for 40 bucks and the problem with these guys is well that they are garbage the the value proposition in them however is that when you're getting started you are trying to learn all of the various skills and machining and you're gonna mess up some end mills and you also don't know which sizes of end mills you really need or which types there's different flute counts and all these different things so there is an argument to be made that it's worth buying one set of these crappy ones and just to kind of get your feet wet and then figure out first of all if this is really for you and second of all you know it helps you learn what to look for in in quality and mills if if we were doing everything really the best way I would say don't even bother with the cheap end mills because it's so much easier to get nice results with the quality and Mills quality tooling matters I think a lot more on the mill bandit does on the lathe but let's face it you're gonna buy a set of these because everybody does I mean 40 bucks now compare that to quality Mills which can be you know hundreds of dollars apiece and you can see why the temptation is so strong to buy those sets now you don't have to go all the way that crazy there are you know extremely high quality tools like you're you know you're kena metal and your sandwich and your Niagra but you can also buy kind of prosumer cutters like these guys these are Hotel which is now a house brand of MSC direct hashtag not sponsored but you know these guys are 40 bucks apiece and they are just night and day better than you know your cheap Chinese ones so there's a little bit of middle ground you don't have to go all the way to your pro industrial cutters so after you've broken and dulled and gotten sick of the cheap ones you're gonna buy a few nice ones and you'll learn that you don't actually need that many sizes you know here's a set of half-inch and mills and honestly I do 90% of my work on the vertical mill with these guys now and mill geometry is an extremely complicated and detailed subject you could spend years learning but since this is a home hobbyist YouTube channel I can give you the very basics that are is it really all you need to know in the home shop so this is a roughing end mill it's got kind of that corncob appearance to it you can take more aggressive cuts with this guy leaves a slightly worse finish and then these are your finishing end mills and these guys come in basically two and four flute versions there's there's others you can get three fluid and eight flute and all kinds of different things but generally speaking the two flute is good for softer metals like aluminum and brass that need a little more time to get out of the way of the cutter and then for flute is going to be better for us steel and things like that and then as you get into different projects you'll find you might need a few specialty mills so you know I needed a very long quarter inch end mill for a deep slot I had to cut this is a ball end mill you know for making a little inside fill it's and things and then this is a carbide chamfering mill so you know for making bevels on things and then the last sort of major category of cutters that you need to think about our kind of you're facing tools and you can buy like big facing mills that take expensive complicated carbide inserts I personally don't think those are a great fit for small hobbyist machines that you might have at home same as you know I've said about the lathe carbide has minimum feeds and minimum speeds to perform well and home machines just tend not to have the horsepower and the RPM that you really need to get good performance out of carbide so I stick generally with high speed steel both in in mills and for facing I think shell mills are a great option for the home shop and they are basically a giant high speed steel end mill and they are hollow in the middle so that you don't pay for a whole bunch of high speed steel atoms that you're not going to use and they work similar to an end mill and that you can cut 90 degree inside corners with them but yeah these guys are a little bit expensive but they perform really really well on small low horsepower machines for facing off large surfaces and then the other option that you might consider for facing large surfaces at home is the fly cutter these are actually really easy to make they're also inexpensive to buy and they are basically just a disc that holds a lathe tool bit effectively at a slight angle and they are a single point cutting tool that rides in the mill and they have all the advantages of a single point cutting tool on the lathe in that the tool pressure is very low and you can get very very good surface finishes with them but like all single point cutting tools they from a lack of speed so fly cutters can't take very deep cuts they aren't extremely rigid and they have to be fed very very slow because you're only getting a tiny bit of cutting on a small portion of the rotation of that cutter as opposed to an end mill where you know you're cutting all the time usually on you know two or four surfaces and so you can move a lot of material for each rpm of that spindle where versus the fly cutter which is doing very little work on each lap around okay we're almost ready to make some chips I know that's what you're waiting for but we need to talk real briefly about how parallels because parallels are essential on the mill you will need to buy a set of these right away the good news is here is that at least for the home hobbyist the cheap sets of these are actually pretty decent and so the way these guys work is they typically come in a set and they're all the same thickness and then they range in height from you know this to this whatever they come in different sets but sort of a typical set like this is just fine as you get into more and more different types of operations you know you'll want different kinds of parallels you can get thicker ones you can get really thin ones you can get wavy ones so there's lots of special purpose parallels and here's an example of some of those specialty parallels I talked about these are very thin parallels great for working on small things as I often do and these were actually a viewer gift from Joe over at Sierra specialty auto so thank you very much Joe and you should check him out but a real basic set like this which I will link to down in the description won't set you back a lot of money and will serve you pretty well so what does pretty well look like so here's one of those parallels and well let's see how parallel that actually is I got a 10th style test indicator on there and if I can keep from falling off the edge of this skinny little guy you can see that actually end end there's maybe half a tenth in there so these things are actually pretty darn parallel now the real secret though is they have to be a matched pair because you're frequently using two of them and if they aren't the same height then they aren't going to be as precise let's see if they're skimping here on the matching of the pairs so that guy was on zero that guy's also on zero so not too bad not too bad at all so again you know same amount of error there's maybe a tenth in from one end to the other there and it's certainly within 1/10 from one parallel to the other so yeah these these cheap guys are honestly not too bad you know for for the money this is certainly enough precision for anything that we're going to do here in the home shop so what are parallels actually for well they allow us to translate a surface from one area to another the most common use of that is in here in the vise so recall that the fixed jaw of the vise is our precision reference surface on the machine and the base of the vise is precisely oriented off of the fixed jaw at 90 degrees so ideally you always want your stalk sitting down in this corner because this is a precise reference 90 degrees however the vise jaws are frequently too deep for the part that you want to work on and so that's where the parallel comes in by placing this parallel right in here what we've done then is translated the base of the vise upwards to here and by extension we've translated the 90 degree reference corner that we had up to here and so again assuming this parallel is precision ground and we haven't introduced any error by doing this then we've now got a new precision fixed reference corner right here on the machine and this happens to be a much more convenient place for us to work with now there's a lot more to know about proper use of parallels and properly seating stock in the vise and how to square up stock we're not going to talk about any of that right now we're just here to make some chips and so the quickest way to do that is just drop some parallels on there that are going to leave you enough vise jaques pose to get a decent grip on your stock while still leaving you enough room to do some damage and then clamp down your vise and let's make some chips now again I'm skipping a bunch of steps here for the proper way to seat stock and device when you're really actually trying to make something flatten square okay so save your comments unless you want to give me some engagement but no seriously save your comments we're gonna get to the proper way to do all this stuff we're just here to make some chips but wait a sec what about that stock what should you use for your first time out you just wanna make some chips you want to have a little fun on your new toy well I'm gonna refer you to the video on how to buy metal for the lathe and I think all of the same rules apply as far as you know what's good to start with with one exception and that is aluminum recall that I recommended against aluminum for your first you know a few tries on the lathe because it's difficult to make it to break chips it's very stringy it can be difficult to manage on the lathe on on the mill however the interesting thing about the mill and multi-point cutters is that with a multi-point cutter every cut is an interrupted cut and what that means is that you don't have to worry about breaking chips your chips all break automatically because it's an interrupted cut every time that cut is interrupted a chip has no choice but to form so all of the disadvantages of aluminum vanish on the mill and in fact on the mill aluminum is great for beginners because it doesn't need a ton of rigidity it's really easy to work with and it's very easy to get really nice finishes on it as this old Tony says aluminum makes everyone look like a hero and it's true because he's a smart guy so aluminum great choice for the beginner okay so we're about ready to start cutting here but the question now becomes how do we know where to start and how deep to go well this is algorithmically analogous to the first facing cut you make on the lathe this first surface you create is going to become your reference surface for the rest of the operations but more importantly for this demonstration is you have to control your depth of cut now on a part like this it's it's pretty easy because there's a factory surface here and so it's relatively flat but let's say you were trying to mill this story state of affairs and we've got a lousy bandsaw cut here and you know someone went on break here and then came back and you've got a high spot over here you got a low spot right there and you've got maybe a medium high spot over here and a bit of a slope so depending on where you touch off and then how you set your depth of cut from there you know you could be cutting okay over here and then then you know quite a bit too deep over here so you need take a good look at your surface and you can generally eyeball where the high spot is and just make sure you touch off on the high spot and then set your depth of cut from there and then after each pass you can go down some amount and know that you will never be going deeper than that amount after that first pass and you don't necessarily want to try to clean it all up at once you know just like on the lathe you might have to do multiple passes to get rid of all the low spots and that's okay I just focus on managing your depth of cut and not on trying to clean up in the fewest passes but alright we got this nice easy block of aluminum so let's make some noise so I'm going to bring my column down and get in the ballpark of my surface machinists have very small ballparks remember and now I'm going to kind of wind out my x-axis to the where the cutter is just kind of on the edge of my surface there and that my x-axis is noisy you're hearing the freewheelin of the spur gears on the power feed so don't be alarmed by that and now go ahead and set your rpm and you know this is now we're in two speeds and feeds territory which much like the lathe is a fine art and science on the mill as well and it takes practice but when you're first getting started you know any end mill less than half an inch 800 rpm is a good place to start and you can play with it from there larger faced mill yeah start with 500 yeah you'll probably be fun so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna feed down using the fine feed on my quill until I just touch off on that surface I'm gonna have far to go because we got close with the column so it should only be should only be you know ten twenty thousand that surface okay there we are there and now I will wind it off the surface like so and then I can come up here to my quill dro and zero that and now I can feed using the fine feed on my quill and set my depth of cut from here and as we said in the first video in this series you know you can manage your depth of cut using the quill you don't have to go all the way to the column for every single thing and especially since we're milling aluminum we don't need maximum rigidity here so now what we can do is just go ahead and feed in some depth here so this is aluminum it's really easy to cut so we'll go fifty [Music] thousand that's normal everything moves a bit when you lock it and that's just nature of the beast so if you need that depth to be precise then unlock a little bit adjust lock it again until it lands on the measurement you want when it's locked but we don't really care here so we're just making some chips cutting fluid on the mill always a good idea just like on the lathe for aluminum wd-40 and makes a great cutting fluid so I'll just get some of that on there and now I'm just going to feed in by hand with my x-axis and let's make some chips and as far as feed speed goes you know once again you're just trying to get the feel of it practice practice practice and you'll you'll learn when it feels good and when the mill is working too hard or you know you're not hard enough I'm gonna pause here for a moment to talk about this situation here now on the lathe you don't have to worry about chip control because the chips always just fall away from the work on the mill however they have a tendency like this to collect and sit on top and you really want to avoid recutting your chips it's going to mess up your your dimensions and it's hard on the end Mills and if you're cutting something like steal the chips may be harder than the actual stock is because of the heat so yeah you want to avoid this situation and so you want to keep your chips clear now the best way to do that is of course flood coolant but most of us home gamers aren't equipped for that so you can blow them out of the way with air you can hit them with the wd-40 spray or you can pause and brush them out of the way as well so only certain kinds of operations is is this going to happen it's most prevalent with slot cutting like we're doing here but yeah just you know try to try to keep your chips clear of the cutter but by all means do not get your hands in here to do that if you have to use a brush or get in there close pause pause the spindle and get in there and clean up your mess and just like on the lay the resist the urge to touch these chips with your hands because they are sharp and sometimes also very hot so use a chip brush or compressed air or vacuum to clear your chips and just like that you are a male operator okay well if you are following along with your new mill you've now got it set up you learned the basics and you made some chips so I hope we've we've had some fun here along the way but we've got a lot more to learn in order to achieve anything approximating precision work but we've got a base here that we can build on and gradually improve our precision as we learn more and better techniques so thank you very much for watching please do consider supporting me on patreon and we will see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 90,612

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, jewlery making, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe

Id: _HGGkCaYMVA

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019