What *should* a Warco Super Major Milling Machine be able to accomplish?

I would like all the things please.

From your comment do i assume you are milling with the Y axis,

Steve.

That is a fair assumption. Using the power feed.

Sorry but my power feed is on the X axis. It was just you saying you push the work against the fixed jaw.

Steve.

Sorry, Daddy brain.

Think about the cut pushing material outwards towards the fixed jaw.

Ah yes now i see what you meant. Oops.

Steve.

If the cutter is wider than the workpiece, cutting to one side should emulate conventional milling (avoiding climb milling on smaller machines), while cutting with It offset . As always, I suppose there are limits to how far the cutter should be offset, to avoid other issues...

When using the 63mm widax cutter i offset it strangely by the amount that it sounded right. + the cut was the cleanest. This was when the left side of a clockwise cut was about 10mm beyond the left side of the piece. & the right side had around 30mm overhang. It cut beautifully. As others have remarked on this forum that trial & error is the best way to achieve.

I have taken this premis on board & always listen to a cut. It works well.

steve.

Lee, I've had my Warco Super Major about 3 months now and can confirm the same disturbing head noise demonstrated in your video so it looks like we're both on the same learning curve. "Surely it's not supposed to sound like that" is the question I've been asking myself almost every time I a take a cut. With everything nipped down, I took a 2x3 deep x100 mm conventional cut at 1600rpm in mild steel with a brand new Banggood 12mm carbide 4 flute choked down in an R8 collet at about 1 mm/sec feed and it sounded like the head was going to start stripping gears any second. That's not even 1cubic centimetre let alone 3/4 of a cubic inch and over nearly 2 mins! I persisted and got a nice cut but that's not how it sounds on you-tube was all I was left thinking. So I am very dubious about removing metal in any quantity or I need to change my expectations about what noise is 'right'. Warco (et al) could do worse than produce a reference musical - call it the Sound of Milling.

Colin,

But then no one would buy them

I can't comment on the mill, as I've never seen one let alone used one. But one ought to at least give it a fair test. One, use a quality brand cutter. Two, get the feeds and speeds correct. Spindle speed is a little low, although I think it's the top speed of the mill. The big problem is that the feed is far too slow; 1mm/sec is 60mm/min giving a chip load of 0.0094mm per tooth. The cutter will be rubbing rather than cutting. The problem will be exacerbated by a low cost cutter which may be blunt from the off compared to better quality cutters. I'd be running at more like 250mm/min for a chip load of 0.04mm per tooth.

Before someone points out I'm using a Bridgeport I'd point out that at 1.5hp the Bridgeport is somewhat lower power than the mill in question, and it's old and worn out. Bit like the operator.

Andrew

Andrew, surely you are wearing out and not yet worn out, just like a lot of the forum members

Colin, conventional cutting ends the cut with a sudden release of torque at the end of the cut. Using a 12mm cutter, even with 4 flutes, to do a 2mm wide cut means that as one edge does the cut the next one is in free air. There will be a time between the cutting process finishing for one edge before the next edge engages. This releases the pressure on the drive between each cut taking place and you get a pulsing torque on the spindle that is transferred up into the gearbox and will cause a lot of noise. Sometimes a smaller cutter will be better for shallow cuts like this, you don't have the shock absorbing benefit of drive belts.

Recommended step over for finishing is 3-5% of diameter of the cutter. Recommended step over for roughing is 30-50%.

For Ø12mm this gives a finishing step over of 0.36mm to 0.6mm and a roughing step over of 2.6mm to 6mm. Your 2mm step over is falling between the two into the light roughing area and is probably the the noisiest option you could have.

Martin C

Martin, what you say makes perfect sense when you think about it - which of course never occurred to me. I was thinking 'big rigid cutter'. I'll be in the shed...

This type of mill is always going to sound unpleasantly loud due to the gearbox or you may have excessive play between the drive pulley & the spindle splines, if your machine is built up that way? Build quality will determine how loud your noise is. A 'work around' could be light cuts & high feed rate but that doesn't really solve the basic problem.

Tony