Friday, October 7, 2016

Broken bits - CNC isolation milling and V-cutters

I buy inexpensive V-cutters for milling printed circuit boards (and recently switched to 20°, sharper ones). Often, the very end of the cutter breaks on the first contact with the copper layer (it is just so delicate). Usually I have either to compensate for the missing Z depth manually, or restart the job... else it will not carve enough and will not go through the copper layer.

From now on I think I will break the tip of the V-shaped mill bit myself before using one! Why?

V-cutter for milling PCB: pristine, slightly damaged and obviously broken. But the last one is my choice!