Peter Grey wrote:
Hi all,

I've been having newbie ruminations. After spending some time making
brackets using my vertical mill/drill, it became obvious how much quicker it
would be to use a horizontal mill with some ganged cutters on an arbor to do
this particular job. Sigh... I suspect a horizontal is in my future.

Anyhow, I wondered if there was a system of ganged cutters available for a
vertical mill. IOW, "stackable" cutters mounted on a small arbor and
inserted into a collett or dedicated holder. Obviously, the approach would
be different than on a horizontal, but it seems possible to do something
like this and minimize the number of passes that one would have to make on
some applications.

Has this been tried and rejected, or not tried for some reason that's not
obvious to me?

Sure, you can buy "stub milling arbors" with an R-8 shank.
You wouldn't want to have cutters spaced more than a couple of
inches apart to keep bearing loads within reason, bit there's
no problem with doing this. I have never stacked cutters,
but I have used the stub arbors in a Bridgeport with a 1J
head, and they work fine. They can also produce an AMAZING
amount of chips in minutes, which must mean they are really
doing a lot of work.

Jon