When you are not in a cut but positioning between cuts (or moving to a tool change position, etc., i.e. cutting air) you will appreciate having fast travel rates, but on a machine with a small work envelope it becomes less of an issue. On an X3, you will likely never approach 40IPM in a cut unless you are machining butter (or aluminum with a high speed spindle). You will certainly never be taking .04" per flute. That would twist an X3 into a pretzel and you would be replacing inserts every pass. My RF45 with servos maxes out at 80IPM but it seems like an eternity when rapiding from one end of the 22" x travel to the other, but is in fact only 15 seconds or so. In a production environment, this would cost me some profit, but for a hobby machine (which mine is) it's acceptable. Other than that, it's just a bunch of chest-thumping. That said, I tuned mine way up when I got it and had to back it down to it's current reliable setting.
Joe |