Why did nobody warn me about chamfer wear on aluminum?

Tbh, I ran the same 3/8 chamfer mill for 6 months on 6061 and thought the finish was fine until I put a new one in last Tuesday. The edge quality difference was night and day, and I realized I'd been compensating with slower feeds for way too long. Has anyone else noticed their parts look fine until the tool is dead, or do you guys change chamfers on a set schedule?

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patricialee1mo ago

Used to be a set schedule guy, always swapped chamfers every couple weeks no matter what they looked like. But this post honestly hit home because I did the exact same thing with a 1/4 inch ball mill on some thin gauge stuff. Parts looked acceptable, measured within tolerance, and I figured the wear was just part of the deal. Then I grabbed a fresh one from the drawer out of habit and the surface finish was so clean it made the old ones look like garbage. That moment changed my whole view, now I keep a test piece by the machine and run it every shift to check edge quality. The cost of stopping early is way less than the time I wasted fiddling with feeds and speeds to hide a dying tool.