Old-school speeds and feeds beat the CAM defaults, finally got it

Ran a 6061 aluminum job last Tuesday, 20 parts, and kept breaking 1/4 inch end mills. Three scrap parts and two snapped tools, each bit was like 14 bucks. My CAM software kept spitting out 8000 RPM with a 40 inch per minute feed. Read an old forum post from 2011 about cutting with chip load in mind, so I dropped the spindle to 6500 and bumped the feed to 60 IPM. Chips came out perfect, no chatter, and the finish looked better than anything I'd done in six months. I used to trust the defaults blindly, but now I double check every roughing pass against what the tool maker says. Anyone else find the built-in feeds are too conservative or just wrong for their machine?

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