People use wood router bits the same way that they use plastic routers bits, but the materials are just different. Whatever type of router bits people use, they want to end up with a high quality finish in whatever material they are routing; and many of the processes and techniques involved with wood and plastic are identical. There is one major difference with the use of plastic routers bits, though: there is the problem of cut chips re-welding to the piece of plastic that is being routed. This occurs especially frequently with softer plastics, and it is just not a problem with wood router bits.
Preventing the re-welding of plastic chips to the base material while still ensuring a fast feed rate can be difficult, but it is not impossible. It is necessary to keep the materials cool while working within the confines of the router’s acceleration, deceleration, and curve speed limitations when cutting radii and corners. The user should avoid dead stops, for starters, which happens when the router stops and dwells while cutting corners and it can lead to an increase in heat and re-welding. This can be avoided by using exit ramp programming with the router bits, which programs the tool to see corners as outside loops.
Another problem that can occur to chip re-welding while using plastic routing machines is the continual contact of the surface during the initial plunge of an inside cut, which prevents the chips from being evacuated and can damage the router over time. In order to avoid the heat and other damages, the user should use ramp-in programming techniques. This will gradually plunge the plastic routers bits just as they start their forward travel, and limit the time that the router dwells to a minimum.
One thing that can also help with plastic routing to avoid this unique problem of chip re-welding that comes from the router dwelling is to rout the hole when boring a dedicated hole. It’s possible to use router bits with small diameter, ramp them into the hole using a circular motion and continue doing so until the hole is a satisfactory size.
Dwell points are a major contributor to the problem of chip re-welding that comes with plastic routing. While the routing of plastic is very similar to that of wood, this is a unique problem that has unique solution.

For more resources regarding pastic routers bits or even about wood boring drill bits and especially about composite routing please review these pages.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Information Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.