I was asked to make some blast gates for a friend which were similar to mine but made out of plastic (mine are maple).
Each one was made out of 1 large polypropylene (PP) cutting board from a big box store. They have a built in spring lock that holds them open or closed and are sized for 4" schedule 40 PVC pipe.
Interesting thing about drilling the holes in PP was I used an Amana 1/8" ‘O’ bit but the bit kept loading up with melted plastic which I had to clean off about every minute. I finally solved the problem by running the router at a speed of 1 with pecking depth of cut being .05 and full extraction after every bite. I did try a 1/8" compression end mill, but had more of a loading up problem than with the ‘O’ bit.
I made all the other cuts with a 3/16" compression em at a router speed of 3 and 60 ipm and a depth of cut of .15 with no problems and perfect chips.
3D tabs of .2 & .2 worked perfectly.
Here’s a case of a Makermade router works fine for me.
Pony
