The problem with milling aluminium is if you don't clear the chips away from your stock, they weld themselves to the endmill causing breakage. A common way to clear this is to use an air nozzle connected to a compressor. This can be very loud and in my case of having a relatively small compressor, the compressor cant keep up and will keep shutting off half way through the milling operation resulting in a broken endmill.

After pondering with this for quite sometime I decided to see what I could do to solve this. The result was a small fan that attached to the end of my spindle forcing air onto the workpiece too clear away the glitter.

This works very well, and obviously can be scaled up to fit possibly the ER16 or ER20 spindles

Prusa

i3 MK3

No

No

0.2

20%