An old timer at the shop in Dayton told me my feeds and speeds were backwards and it took me 2 weeks to admit he was right | CNC Operators - Opinions Matter
An old timer at the shop in Dayton told me my feeds and speeds were backwards and it took me 2 weeks to admit he was right
I ran a little Haas TM-1 in a job shop outside Dayton for almost 3 years and I was pretty proud of my speeds. Then this retired guy named Walt came in part time to help with some overflow work and watched me run a batch of 6061 brackets one Tuesday. He did not say much, just kind of stood there, and then said "you are babying that cutter, you are rubbing it to death instead of cutting." I got defensive at first because I had been running the same numbers forever. He pulled up a chip load chart on his phone and showed me I was running about half the feed I should have been. We bumped my feed from 18 to 34 inches per minute and dropped the spindle a little, and the finish came out better and my cycle time dropped about 40 percent on that part. I still think about how many hours I burned over the years spinning my wheels, literally. Any of you guys ever have somebody half your speed show you up with one sentence?