G-Wizard Gains Plastics, Composite PC Board, and Wood Materials

Just finished up a 12 hour long day of number crunching to add wood, composite PC board, and new versions of plastics to the Material list for G-Wizard‘s Feeds and Speeds calculator.

G-Wizard uses an unusually detailed database for its Feeds and Speeds. This is one reason why it produces better results than the other calculators. The downside is that it is a lot of work to crunch all that data, and there is a fair amount of manual work involved too. This is also why its hard to set up G-Wizard so you could enter your own materials. It would take a lot of data for each material, and some of it is pretty arcane.

In order to crunch this data, I reviewed no less than 15 different manufacturer’s data. As a result, we have the following new materials in the database:

- Plastics: Hard (Styrene, Nylon, Polypropylene, PVC, Polycarbonate, etc.)
- Plastics: Soft (e.g. HDPE, PEEK, Foam Board, APET, Acetal/Delrin, etc.)

Originally we had one grade of plastics, and that’s just not enough to even begin to do justice to plastic. Down the road, I have a plan to break it down even further, but this is actually a lot bigger for plastics machinists than just one more entry might seem.

- Wood: Hardwood
- Wood: MDF
- Wood: Plywood
- Wood: Softwood

I’ve noticed we’ve been getting a lot of traffic from the CNC router community, and I felt bad that I wasn’t supporting them. So, I figured I’d fix that.

The last category is:

- Composite: Fiberglass/PC Board

You could use this for most any kind of glass cloth embedded in an epoxy composite. Won’t work for carbon fiber or crazy stuff like Kevlar, but it is a start.

PC Board machining is popular among the CNC crowd, so this is a good add too.

An observation: machining these materials results in some fast feeds and speeds. A good CNC router with a 15-20K rpm spindle needs some fast motion to really take advantage of the speeds and feeds that are possible. I’ve seem some video of some of these machines and it’s a lot of fun to watch how fast even the shopbuilt units move:

Routing a guitar body on a homebrew CNC router…

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