Machining Macor, feeds and speeds?

Hi all,

Just looking for some advice on milling a Macor part on a Hurco VM1. Following the recommended feeds and speeds from the manufacturer guidelines my machining time according to RhinoCam is 110 hours, completely unacceptable for my production schedule. The part is quite intricate and I have to use 2mm diameter endmills and ballnose mills, unfortunately the recommended feed for these tools is around 15mm/min with max spindle speed at 2000rpm. Does anyone have experience of machining Macor with tools of this diameter, and if so have you tried faster feeds/speeds with any degree of success? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Here is a link, to a site, where they talk about .002" per tooth. You may be able to call, and talk to them, and possibly get some info. from them?

"Act dumb, and they may tell you everything! Act like you already know, they may ignore you."

Maybe they could help.

Thanks. I have contacted the company in England that I sourced the material from via email, but they just reiterated what was on the website. I will ring them this morning and see if they have any other advice. It may be faster to get them to machine the parts to be honest, our production schedule for that machine is very tight and involves lots of different parts in metal and plastic, I can't really justify allocating a week to machine a couple of small Macor parts.

I once read an article, on a way to reduce machining time.

What you do, for the bulk of the removal of the material... is drill it. You drill all bulk material away.

When End Milling, you may step over, possibly 1/2 or less because of strain on the cutter. It just cannot handle the heavy side loads.

In order to remove vast amount of material fast, they drilled. Drilling strait down... the tool can handle the full diameter of the cutter.

So they used a drill pattern, and removed nearly all the bulk, then went back with one rough cut, and one finish cut. The time to do
the part was greatly reduced.
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I have used this method on slotting... to remove the bulk of the material, then went back in and finished the operation.

You may already know this, only food for thought.