Feed and Speeds for wood

[analogman]

Hey all, I am having a pit of trouble finding feeds and speeds for wood/fiberglass, specifically:

1/4" brad point bit drill through birch (too much burning)

1/8" brad point bit drill through fiberglass (too much burning)

1/2" spiral full carbide in baltic (tip getting a little too hot)

Suggestions?

thanks

[ger21]

If you're using brad point drill bits in a router, don't way, way too fast.

For the 1/2" spiral, 12,000 rpm and 150-200ipm, maybe even faster.

[analogman]

OK, thanks. I guess to replace the brad point bit, I can plunge cut with my 1/4 and 1/8" router bits.

[CarveOne]

Try doing peck drilling instead of one pass drilling.

The epoxy resin in fiberglass will easily melt and stick to the drill if the rpm is not kept very low or misted with water while drilling. Typical routers will not go low enough in rpm. Hand drill speeds are better.

CarveOne

[Dropout]

Everyone forgets that this is about chip load. Match the rpm to the chip load at the feedrate that you are running. It may mean that you are using 10,000 rpm instead of 18,000 but your router bits will thank you.

You don't mention the feedrates you're running but we drill 5mm holes in melamine at 120 IPM at 6,000 rpm (150 IPM chips the surface). Since our vacuum system isn't as good as we'd like it, we typically run mdf and melamine (birch would be similar) with a 3/8 single flute compression bit at 250 IPM and 16,000 RPM. We'd need to run a 2 flute at 500 IPM.

Dropout