Cutting Speeds

In the metalworking field, one can look in the Machinery's Handbook to find cutting speeds for a plethora of materials from A2 to Waspalloy. Where does a feller find the cutting speeds for various woods? I'm looking for a Feet per Minute type of number. An added bonus would be a breakdown for carbide and HSS.

I have Googled, Yahoo'd, and yes checked the Machinery's Handbook. The handbook does have an interesting table on the machinability of various woods in certain operations like planing, boring, mortising, shaping, turning, etc.. However, I couldn't find anything that says for example, Red Oak 10000fpm carbide 7500fpm HSS or the like.

I'm not sure that has fully been calculated. I like to read tech stuff about wood working (even though I don't retain it) and i don't remember seeing it. I hope someone gives you a good answer because I would like to know. It might have something to do with the fact that all red oak is not the same hardness. It should very from tree to tree and by water content where a steel of a certain % carbon (and what ever other materials) would only change hardness by temp (and even that will only be if the temp. changes a lot).

I bet there's general feed/speed info in the old pattern maker books.

I don't recall seeing it in print anywhere either. There are probably too many variables to come up with firm numbers and most older wood working machinery didn't have variable speeds. The variables would be type of wood, moisture content, grain pattern, old growth, new growth, end grain, face grain, hook angle, type and number of cutters, etc.

The variables in the hardness, etc. of wood is a valid point and the table I referred to in the original post is a "percentage" table. For instance red oak in a shaping operation 27 pieces turned out "perfect" and 73 pieces turned out "good". Also, if you found a speed that works good for a particular species you could reverse calculate the cutting speed using the diameter of the cutter and the RPM then make your own chart.

See attached PDF file...

And some interesting stuff here...
http://www.woodmachining.com/backissues.html

Onsrud has a chip load calculator on their website.
https://www.onsrud.com/xdoc/FeedSpeeds
It separates material by Hardwood, Softwood, Plastic etc... Does not break it down to Red Oak vs Alder but might be helpful.

Cheers!

Mike Ross

Unless you are power feeding the material you should be able to tell by feel and sound