Cutting stainless steel on a router

[jsheerin]

I'm bored waiting for fea to run on a frame design, so here's a 'what I did last week' post - I cut stainless steel using my router. Pics are below. I was working on welding oxygen sensor bungs (threaded bosses) to the stainless exhaust pipes on my motorcycle. My first idea was to drill the required holes in the pipes with a hole saw, so I got one at the hardware store. I made a test cut in a tube of 304 I'd bought to practice on before I tore into my bike's pipes. The hole saw melted on the stainless. Must have got a crappy one... Alright, so it was late at night and I want to make some holes. I ran inside, programmed a quick hole pocketing operation and put my pipe on my router. I cut 0.005" per pass at 10ipm with a 2 flute carbide endmill. It took about 20 minutes to cut a 3/4" hole (mostly due to the pipe being round, so I had to cut about 0.2" deep). It turned out nice. I'm not saying the surface finish is amazing, but the hole was the right size and considering I was welding to it, perfectly serviceable. The last pic is the finished part. Don't judge my weld to harshly - I'm still a beginner and this was my first stainless work ever.

I couldn't figure out how to fixture the second pipe on my router, so I hacked a hole out with a dremel tool and grinding wheel and then made it round with a carbide burr in a foredom. That was probably faster than the router but not quite as fun.

[Benonymous]

I'm impressed :-)

I have seen another 3 axis machine cutting steel, mild steel, the guys programmed it to go in and just take a whiff off each pass. The cutting would've taken hours! The big issue is tool pressure going into such a hard material.

Most woodworking machines can't take the pressure and lack the rigidity to do practical cutting.

[jsheerin]

That's how I do aluminum cutting on my router - it takes hours and the finish still usually isn't great, but good enough. I usually go more like 0.010" per pass at up to 20ipm on aluminum though. I was surprised it did as well as it did on the stainless.

[dertsap]

I always believe that almost anything can be done , it's all in the approach


this was my experiment , YouTube - cutting steel




it was programmed to 120ipm but for the initial slot through I dropped it to 60 , part way thru the pass back i bumped it up to the 120 (1/2 way thru the vid) , it takes only .01 engagement per loop but as you can see 120 ipm can remove material quickly ,
it was the same deal as yours , not a perfect finish but not to shabby either
the only problem that I found was that there were fine needle like chips everywhere