What end mill for engraving (high speed)

The ones I've seen have been second-cousin to a D-bit. Look like a scratch awl tip stoned in half. Guy Lautard had some tips on how to make one along with engraving pantograph drawings, see The Machinist's Bedside Reader series.

Stan

You generally do not use end mills for engraving, you use single flute engraving cutters.

Visit

Thanks. Nice website. I am on it right now. I will hopefully engrave with a Bosch router, and I would like to run them at 15k RPM or more.

Maybe the diagram here would be useful

One tip: Get your base mill finished and debugged before going off on tangents like high speed spindles. Sort out your mystery limit switch trips, figure out your spindle encoder since you'd likely use use tapping more than engraving, etc.

Lots of suppliers. Two common types split point and pyramid

see

-- Unka George (George McDuffee) .............................. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. L. P. Hartley (1895-1972), British author. The Go-Between, Prologue (1953).

Most that I've seen for engraving are vee cutters, some with flats on the end.

eBay has solid carbide vees for cheap:

-- If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do. -- Samuel Butler

I just bid, don't outbid me.

karl

I've bought from these folks and been happy with the product:

Silly rabbit. Had you checked, you'd have found that you could do a BIN for -ten- of 'em from another guy for under $18. Maybe you'll luck out and be outbid after all. ;)

-- If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do. -- Samuel Butler

Guys, what is a good angle for them? 90%? 60%?

Yes! Oh, you meant degrees, not percent, right? It depends on the depth of cut and thickness of the sheet. Do you want fine writing or bold? 60 is good for deeper cuts, 90 for shallower. What font are you going to use, what application, etc., Ig?

The correct answer is "It depends."

-- If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do. -- Samuel Butler

Plasma / or laser - only way to engrave nowadays. So hook a laser head up to your Bport EMC2? why not?

Don't waste your time with cutters - its too labor intensive. duh.......... THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX (never heard that one eh?) Geeze you gotta computer controlled ZYX machine why not go out on a limb & do something spectacular? Hell EDM attachment also to burn out broken s*it. geeze come on man. see the forest thru the trees here now.

What box? :)

Well, there are so many "boxes" that we live with. Reminds me of an old Toolmaker - acktually the mold shop foreman at the time. Good old George, smart guy. Knew alot about machining. fixtures, jigs, cutters, good at trig, cross slide turntable wiz, indexing with dividing & Harig heads ect. Anyway he had a black box. Kept in his tool box, kinda like a secret thing. Would always ask the guys that came over to his bench " Wanna see whats in the box today? - for a dollar" He'd change it around with different "stuff" he'd collected over the years, or sometimes nothing! Kept the money collected in a cup & when there was enough lunch would be on him. So lesson learned???????

Smart ass me: " I dont care about boxes, the question is, whats your bag man"

You paid too much. Some people are never confined to some box, no matter what size.

I don't carry a purse, either. :)

Your slide rule doesn't have a log scale. :-) I don't suppose most people will recognize it anyway. ...lew...

Well ... actually the "log" scale on a slide rule is linear, as all the other scales are either logarithmic or more extreme (e.g. the log-log scales).

So -- based on that, the engraved slide rule has two "log" scales on the body -- and *no* scales on the slide.

Also -- it is missing a cursor. :-)

Enjoy, DoN.

Cursor? That's someone who doesn't know how to use a slide rule. ;-)