flycut 1350 contour cutter plotter review

Flycut 1350 contour cutter plotter review manual#

Here’s a good demo of a fly cutter from Tormach: OTOH, if you are going to finish the surface in some other way, perhaps not even on a milling machine, the fly cutter may be slower than a face mill at material removal rates. In most cases, the best finish will be one that can be done in one pass, which implies a large diameter tool and therefore probably not a face mill. Many say their secret weapon for fine aluminum finishing is a fly cutter with a PCD (diamond) insert.ĬNC machinists realize the main reason to use a fly cutter is to achieve a very fine surface finish. The exception are those most expensive face mills where you can individually adjust the cutting height of each insert to 0.0001″, because that’s what it takes, and that’s why fly cutters can leave a better finish. Remove all but one insert from your face mill, and finish improves. While the CNC crowd will more often prefer face mills, even many CNC machinists realize that a very fine surface finish may be better done by fly cutting.

Flycut 1350 contour cutter plotter review manual#

I get asked about Fly Cutters and Fly Cutting a lot, there is a lot of traffic to CNCCookbook on those keywords, and Fly Cutters are very commonly used by manual machinists. They’re ideal for smaller machines that don’t have the spindle power needed for Large Face Mills.Much cheaper to buy one insert than many. They’re inexpensive relative to Face Mills.They produce a very fine surface finish–better than most Face Mills.There are 3 big reasons fly cutters are used:

While they can be used on several kinds of machine tool, they are most commonly used on milling machines.įly Cutters are a type of Face Mill that only uses 1 cutting edge using either a hand ground HSS tool or one insert. But, you also see single point form tools referred to as fly cutters on machine tools, for example a form tool being used to create an involute on a gear tooth. The most common fly cutters are used as surfacing tools. They’re an indispensable cutting tool that you should have in your shop.Ī Fly Cutter is any single point cutter that is used on a mill… What’s a Fly Cutter?Ī Fly Cutter is any single point cutter that is used on a machine tool. Everything you need to know about fly cutters right here in one complete guide.