Milling Aluminum

I am about to take the plunge and pre order my Carvey however i have not been completely sold on it yet. I was wondering since some of you guys already have your that you can help me out. I mainly want to cut a 16 gauge aluminum (not super thick) so i can cut different shapes for my jewelry business. I was wondering if anyone can show me or tell me their successes with cutting aluminum or metals in general… i am definitely excited about doing other things but for my jewelry business this is my number one thing! Thanks you guys! I saw the video Inventables did but i am wondering how intricate you can make it!

You’ll have absolutely no problem cutting 16 gauge alum! I’ve done 1/4" and so have many other over here, just fast shallow is the key. :smile:

That’s great!!! How detailed do you think it can get? If you are cutting aluminum soon do you think you can make a video? I would love that!! Thanks!

I can definitely cut a piece of an old project, got some spare 1/8" chunks. As for detail, it all depends on the end mills. The steppers have plenty of “resolution”, in my case, the smallest end mill i have is 1/36" (0.7mm), but i’ve seen much much smaller (0.002"/0.051mm)

that would be awesome!! There aren’t many videos of the carvey yet and i had some people that were in kickstarter that it sucks on aluminum and it kept breaking the bits… so thats why i have been a bit worried about purchasing… but tomorrow i am going to lol! When you have video up let me know… if you can’t post it here can you post on facebook and ill find you?

I just realzed this was on the Carvey section! I was talking about x-carve, altough im guessing the carvey should be pretty similar in stiffness.

please don’t change the category to X-carve… this was a post i want in the carvey section i was curious about it being done on the carvey even though it was talked about on the X-carve… i know this wasn’t you Cristian so disregard this someone changed it to go in the X-carve section

Seems its back on the Carvey section, sorry for the confusion. Maybe someone can tell if the Carvey has the same rigidity of the x-carve?

yea someone else changed it and i switched it back… thank you for your insight i pretty sure that the X-carve and Carvey will have the same spindle strength… i just preordered my carvey today!! Excited to get it sad i have to wait 2 1/2 months for it lol!

Well, the Carvey comes with the 300w spindle i believe, and most of us x-carve owners use the Dewalt router which is a lot more powerfull.