02
END MILL TO
FURNITURE
COLLECTION
Quite a few years ago, a colleague of ours took a moonlighting job design-
ing and building a CNC-fabricated wall of shelving for a client. He returned
exhausted after a weekend of pounding his bookshelf parts together with a
sledgehammer. Brute force was the only way to get the slots in his horizon-
tal shelves to fit completely into the slots of his vertical dividers. Our
friend’s frustrations stemmed from overlooking the role of the rotational
cutter in subtractive machining.
SUBTRACTIVE MACHINING
Routers and milling machines (see Chapter 6)
use extremely sharp, round, spinning tools, or
rotational cutters, called end mills, to make cuts
in a workpiece, or the material being cut. Sub-
traction works like a stonecutter chiseling away
material to produce a form—once the material
is removed, it’s gone for good. The shavings
produced during machining are called chips.
END MILLS
Also called cutters, tools, tooling, or router bits,
end mills are specialized tools that cut while
spinning. They come in a wide variety of geo-
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