Milling Material
Clamping Holes
The CNC has a spoiler board located on its base. Generally, you try to avoid milling into the spoiler but it can be replaced.
The current method for securing material is to just use a glue gun to stick it down then peel it off afterwards.
Later on we may have some mounting holes for clamps, although those haven’t been added in just yet.
MDF
So far I’ve used MDF 12mm thick cut into sections using the table saw.
However, it’s advisable to limit the depth of a pass to about 2mm / 3mm or so at one time, to avoid overloading the stepper motors on the device (milling too much out at one time)
Metal
The Ox CNC has Nema23 motor’s but I think we’re only driving them at about 50% of the power
due to the stepper drivers in use. Generally with metals you have to follow speeds and feeds.
This is where the speed of the spindle has to match the feedrate through the material.
I’d recommend trying two flute bits with aluminum.
I’ve also got a rough speeds / feeds calculator here in the form of a spreadsheet: