[barnesy]

I have to drill & ream 5000 3mm holes in 6061 alum. plate 10 mm thick.Any suggestions on speed & feeds for the drill & reamer would be a great help .
max rpm is 6000. holes are all the way through the plate. I will have polycarbonate sheet under the plate . Will be using alum. tapmatic as coolant

[rhino]

I have to drill & ream 5000 3mm holes in 6061 alum. plate 10 mm thick.Any suggestions on speed & feeds for the drill & reamer would be a great help .
max rpm is 6000. holes are all the way through the plate. I will have polycarbonate sheet under the plate . Will be using alum. tapmatic as coolant

drilling 3mm hole:
350f/min = 11320 rpm
400f/min = 12937 rpm

got these answers off this site: using the imperial equivalent .1181" or 3mm.

they have a calculator on the page if you want to double check.

http://littlemachineshop.com/Referen...tingSpeeds.php

[psychomill]

As Rhino's example shows, you don't have enough RPMs to really run the drill. Even at 200fpm, you don't have the RPM. So, with that in mind,..... run at 6000 rpm. You should look into speeders if you have a bunch to do. Even if you're running a G81 cycle, you're looking at 4hrs+ of drilling I'd say, and you still have to ream. If you use a G81, I'd go with carbide drills. They'll hold their size better and you'll make it through a whole plate. In a peck drill cycle, you could be 3 or 4 times that depending on your peck. Machine positioning speed will have an effect on this as well.

Do you really need to ream the holes? If you have a little tolerance, a carbide drill will hold its size very well. I do a lot of plates that have hole sizes down to .2mm and up to 10,000 holes per part holding +/- .013mm.

If you have to ream, same goes here,... carbide reamers. In either case, HSS/cobalt drills and reamers will work, just change them often and keep the hole sizes in check. And the fluid you're using can be fairly sticky, so watch out for the chips sticking to the cutters. Some water soluble cutting fluid running with "flood" would work better. Anyway, better find a good book if you're drilling this on a 6k spindle.

:cheers:

[barnesy]

Thanks for the suggestions
The customer demands that I ream the holes The reamer that I have got is brand new
and I have been told it will be good for 50,000 holes luckly I only have one plate to do.

[barnesy]

nearly done drilling & reaming holes so far I have drilled and reamed over 3500 holes today it took 7 hrs to just ream the holes 1700 rpm 120 mm/m just need to shift plate and finish drilling and ream the other 1500 holes