Hello, all!

We have recently acquired a Homag N-500 nesting cell. We plan to machine kitchen cabinet parts from 8' x 4' x 3/4" or 20 mm sheets of solid yellow pine. I've talked to the sales reps of Leuco, AKE & Leitz but they really don't know what tool to use for this.

I'm thinking 1/2" solid coated tungsten with an upspiral.

Anyone with experience from this?

Best regards,

Christoffer Söderqvist
Exakt Snickeri
Sweden

FS Tools has an chipbreaker spiral solid carbide cutter recommended for softwoods and fast feedrate. Don't underestimate the ability of brazed straight flute carbide bits. This is what I use to cut out 1 1/2" thick pine parts on a vacuum fixture. I do a final full depth pass at .015" to finish the cut and get reasonable surface finish with only occasional break out at short grain corners.

I think a 3/8" bit would probably do the job for you. Less stress on the machine, lower amount of chips and faster feed rates. At least give it a try.

BH Davis

Using an up spiral bit will depend on the ability of the vacuum to hold your work. If your pieces are small, the lifting action of the spiral will pull them off the table. You can use some toolpath strategies to help like a last pass at 1mm depth of cut and step over of .5mm. But you sacrifice speed.

I can't imagine a 4X8 solid wood panel being consistently flat enough for nested CNC's.

Also, what about blow out in the corners?

Solid wood is a completely different animal than any kind of sheet goods or even plywood.

Up spiral bits can tear it pretty badly even with the grain, especially soft wood like pine. I'd look at chipbreaker compression spirals. You may need both left and right spirals to deal with the aforementioned corners.

When cutting wood or composite wood materials, the damage of welded carbide milling cutters is often not due to tooth wear, but due to the disadvantages of high temperature welding or grinding heat during sharpening

Use a roughing bit hole cutting the parts slightly oversized. Vortex makes a nice 1/2 " roughing bit .

Then do a final pass with a sharp down spiral or straight flute taking off the final 0.01 or so .

Climb cut , and the corners on the right top and esp bottom of the parts may still chop out a bit .

Solid wood is not the easiest to machine on a router

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Skylarker and Acctek...

What does anything you wrote have to do with the original question?

Dropout
I think Acctek is responding to my suggestion of using brazed carbide straight flutes as opposed to solid carbide or insert. It is true that the carbide used for brazed bits cannot take as sharp an edge nor are they as durable as solid carbide tooling. But in my experience with a light weight cnc the bits perform very well. Wear is less of an issue with cutting solid pine as long as you keep a large chip load. I had more corner breaks with spirals than with straight flutes except for a very low angle down shear bit.

If so, my apologies to Acctek.

You need a special brazed 2 flute as the standard flutes don't meet and will not plunge cut. You need ones that have a third piece of carbide added on the end.