Troubleshooting
Poor Surface Finish: Diagnose and Fix It
A rough wall or floor usually comes down to coolant, chip load, or a missing corner radius. Here's the quick diagnostic to get back to a clean finish.
Surface finish is where everything upstream shows up. A torn or hazy wall, a scalloped floor, or chatter ripple each point to a specific cause — and most are a one-knob fix. Run the checklist below before you slow the whole job down chasing finish.
Poor surface finish — causes & fixes
Floors love a corner radius
A sharp-cornered square end mill concentrates all the cutting force on a vanishing point of edge — it leaves a poor floor and chips easily. Adding even a small corner radius spreads the load over an arc, strengthens the corner, and blends the floor finish. RobbJack offers corner radii across its end-mill lines for exactly this reason.
Walls love polished flutes
In aluminum, finish quality is dominated by how cleanly the flute releases the chip. RobbJack's polished-flute and Mirror Edge™ tools (A1-303, AL3, FM/FMHV) shed material without smearing, leaving a bright wall — and the AL3 long-reach series is built to finish a deep wall in a single pass without witness marks.
Get coolant on it, ease the feed and RPM, and put a corner radius on the tool for floors — finish problems are usually this simple.
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