What are the restrictions on aluminum that the v4 can mill? I noticed in some of the photos there is milled aluminum, but I know aluminum requires a bunch of things, including a lubricant mechanism.
Usually the mills I look at are built for routers, so when I see a separate spindle I am curious as to the power and special precautions.
Hi John,
You are correct and you have seen some photos of the Root 4 machining aluminium. I used the machine to make some fairly large panels for the Root IDEX 3D printer which you can see below:
In terms of setup. I was using the standard build of the Root 4 as you can see in the photos with one additional upgrade: which was the air line to help blow chips away.
I used a 2 flute 6mm end mill as I found some of the larger bits easier to dial in. I was doing IIRC 2mm Depth of cut and machining 6mm 6061 plate.
I found at those DOCs there was some noticeable deflection in the bit. which isn’t surprising giving my machine is a large scale 3D cnc machine. but what I did found to be very helpful forimproving the dimensional accuracy of the machine was to do 2 or 3finishing passes to creep up to the final dimension - this worked very well and was a nice trade off between machining time and accuracy.
lubricant wise, I did dabble with some WD40 however that stuff doesn’t evaporate and can get sticky with swarf. I was recommended to use an alcohol based lubricant - which I am yet to try.
spindle wise - I was using the standard 24000RPM spindles. although, the low down RPM torqure of those spindles isnt great - so opting for a lower RPM variant would be recommend if metals were more your thing - but for cutting wood the higher RPMs are defiantly needed.
hope that helps!
Awesome, that helps a lot. I am a huge DIYer and have wanted a CNC for a long time, and wanted to try my hand at building from the ground up.
I’m not super familiar with the spindle mounting set up, but would it be realistic at all to run a “quick swap” (even though it wouldn’t actually be quick) spindle mount setup to run the high RPM for wood and low RPM for metal?
I mean you could swap out the spindles - but it might be too much messing around to do that - the VFD that drives the spindle would need to be reconfigured and that isn’t a nice simple job.
For me - would stick with one spindle type and understand its performance and limits and get the CAM software to make the most out of your setup.
I have the 24000RPM spindle type and given the amount of metal work I do on the CNC this is fine - I understand some of the metal stuff will need to be machined with different setting - perfectly manageable. use the tools to its capabilities.
That’s probably what I am going to end up doing. I don’t see myself doing too many aluminum projects, but I see myself using it a lot for wood.
