Techniques For Coarse Vertical Milling?

Techniques For Coarse Vertical Milling?

I've got a question that some of my clever readers might be able to answer: is there a coarse and powerful equivalent of a vertical mill? Here's the problem: the Sherline vertical mill, even with a stronger vise, still doesn't like taking more than about .050" of Delrin at a cut. I'm making cuts of about .210" deep. If I could find some way to take off .150"-.175" with a powerful but perhaps not terribly accurate tool, then I could use the vertical mill to do the rest.

I've tried to use a bandsaw for this and I'm not impressed with results, partly because a bandsaw intended for wood tends to flex when you ask it to cut something as strong as Delrin. I need a way to rapidly remove rectangles of Delrin.

The temptation is strong to use a drill press, and move the material through an end mill held in the drill press. This doesn't really work because drill presses aren't designed to handle the sideways load, and the spindle detaches after a couple of minutes. (And it's probably not good for it, anyway.)

Is there some other common tool that can be used for this operation? I've experimented with a router, but if you use it for anything but a pretty big piece of wood, it throws the workpiece to the far side of the garage with great enthusiasm! (Be glad that you weren't at the far side of the garage.)

I suspect that a dado blade on a table saw might be way to do this, although I've never used a dado blade before. I suspect that if I used a 1/4" wide dado blade, and lowered it far enough that only about .1875" of it was exposed, I could use a fence on the table saw to make repeated passes through it. For the 1.5" x 2.62" x .1875" section that I need to remove, this would be six passes, each of them only a few seconds long. Then I could complete the process quickly and precisely on the vertical mill.