Small endmills for you builders

I just ran across a website that might help out some of you wanting to push the extremes. They sell endmills down to 0.0002". No typo, that's 2/10,000 of an inch in diameter.

And here I thought my 0.015" channels were small...

http://www.pmtnow.com/

edit: I forgot the link.

And that site would be...........?

http://www.pmtnow.com/

d'oh! I hate it when I do that.

thats freaking nuts man, It would require a spindle speed of at least 60,000rpm for anything less than .01 I bet. I wonder what kinds of speeds you would run a .001" em at much less .0002"

Dude, visit me on msn sometime man


Jon

Thanks, but good god! what the hell would you need that for!?

Precision engraving?? I'm sure Cathar could think of somthing for his Cascades, like focusing on individual areas like he's been talking about.

SatanSkin said:

Thanks, but good god! what the hell would you need that for!?

Click to expand...

Ultra-fine, extreme precision deburring instantly springs to mind. Slotting would also be viable.

JFettig said:

It would require a spindle speed of at least 60,000rpm for anything less than .01 I bet. I wonder what kinds of speeds you would run a .001" em at much less .0002"

Click to expand...

At 60k your carbide will explode the second it meets metal. I've run a .005 ball endmill on grade-1 that only required 8.5k on the r's. At .0002 you'd probably be looking at ~15k for r's, although that's just a rough guestimate.

I must admit, running anything that small is nerve-wracking. The .005 ball endmill I mentioned above ran about $50US per tool. At .0002 the price per tool must be astronomical...probably $150 or more, and if you just breathe on the thing the wrong way it'll break.

Have you ever seen a high speed spindle? they typically run 6000 to 60000rpm.

To run that fast you need balanced tooling and all that though.


Jon

Exactly my point Once you start spinning at 10k+, any centerline deviation between spindle and/or collet and/or shank and/or cutting surfaces (the flutes in this case) and they make themselves known when your cutting surfaces begin vibrating. That's a lot of and/or's, and when the mill itself is at .0002 dia., your tolerance for centerline becomes astounding. Frankly I'm not sure how they're fab'ing such a small mill, because diamond grinders, while accurate, can only handle so much. So assuming they're using diamond/laser/whatever and can achieve an incredible +/-.00001 hold, you're still looking at a potential deviation of 5%. Now imagine running a .25 end-mill with a 5% deviation of .0125, spinning it up, and you can see what I'm getting at

Anyway, cool stuff to think about...wish I could see someone running one of these things

wonder how many of those I could break in an hour???


cool stuff but damn those have to be fragile.

Hey guys, The end mills below 0.0010" are experimental and have milled slots in, brass, soft steels and plastics. OSU has built a machines costing them almost 1 million to run these tools. While we have seen them run several typical milling machines with rpms under 20k. One of the big pushes for milling small slots is to manufacture smaller and smaller microwave guides. JPL has used these for clearer stronger signals for space communication. Even though the parts are very delicate, you would be amazed at how forgiving they are to spindle runnout -as the mill engages the work piece, the feed kinda "self centers" the bit...anyway...my webmaster saw a bunch of hits from this forum and I thought I'd say "hi" and answer any questions you have...DaveB / GM / PMT

cool beans. The smallest end mills I've seen commercially available are 200 microns. That's about the size for fuel injection jets and what they find application for I believe. I think that in this application, the end could be better achieved by means of skiving fins? I would have thought that anything below .5mm lends itself to "filtering" gunk out the water and blocking pretty easily. It might be interesting to increase the surface area or create micro vortices in the "cups" that Cathar's last block I saw had - I think it was called the cascade? The design with the jets directed into a honeycomb matrix of depressions on the baseplate. Kind of pie in the sky for me anyway - my mill's top speed is 2150rpm...