What to do with the milling tag

Question

I just looked through a bunch of milling questions and there is one that stands out.

Can I use a CNC router bit specified for metal on wood?

While technically speaking the milling in his question is the right tag in his question, it refers to milling in machining (wikipedia).

As this SE is about woodworking i'd define the milling as "The process of cutting trunks or part of them into rough-cut lumber. Techniques, tools safety concerns, ...".

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I'm going to remove this tag from the question and add a link to that discussion. The edit has to be approved by the community anyways, so if I'm wrong, no harm done. :) I'd love to hear what you think on this.

Answer 1

I can see the reasoning for this, and even basic web results for "wood milling" will assume you mean to search for info on sawmills and what they do. That being said, "wood milling bits" took me to a page full of references to people doing CNC and 3D milling of materials like wood.

So there is a pretty large segment of the internet population that don't necessary think of the lumber they have as being milled when they plop it in a machine to be "milled" similarly to metal or plastics.

I suppose for the audience for this site, milling will probably mean the activities associated with sawmills. But I wonder how we could capture the latter meaning? (With "cnc" being a bit too specific I think.)

• "3d-milling"? No, because sometimes it is literally only 2D milling.
• "machine-carving"? Please, no. I'm sorry I brought it up.
• "machine-engraving"? Please help me stop.
• "3d-carving"? Hmmm. Since the 3 is the maximum axis count, I could be convinced that this one is the best choice.

Informally, unless you are actually running a CNC machine, most hobbyists are using 3D Carving to describe the machines and techniques they use for milling wood in multiple axis.