sawing on a horizontal mill

I have a large piece of steel to saw. It is 1.5" thick and about 2' long. Too big for my saw. could I saw it in a horizontal mill? I made small slots before but never tried to saw anything that big. Any tips? It is low carbon hot rolled steel.

Are you "ripping" or doing a "cutoff" operation?

By all means you can use a slitting saw...might be better to use a 3/16" wide or 1/4" wide saw for a deep cut like that, and just sacrifice the metal in the kerf over the relatively fine kerf of a bandsaw. A staggered tooth cutter would be preferred in my opinion.

I would pay careful/close attention to how the 2 parts are to be separated...you don't want the kerf collapsing at any time or becoming unstable.

Something would get chucked or broken at that point in time, and I would doubt the mill would be one of those things.

Use coolant mainly for lubricity if you have the cutter deeply buried in the kerf...there's lots of rubbing going on. Also, the chips need to be evacuated from the kerf too....

It's always good to have friends with bigger machines than you have for occasional jobs like this

On Edit, a regular sprial fluted endmill would work too, if you can get one long enough. I would take multiple passes and also same cautions about the kerf width/part clamping.

There is a fairly new member here that does this very thing,I believe.His handle is "Patch" and he's one hellofnice guy.

Should be non issue. Use a decent dia and cut halfway thru and flip. This can alleviate the kerf binding. Clamp down both halfs and they should not curl.

You betcha. However forget that 'slitting' stuff. Ebay is the best source for milling cutters of all sizes. What size mill are you talking about using?

Horizontal mill makes a fine saw--
Be sure you clamp both the stock and drop rigidly.
As Matt said, use a wide-ish cutter. Side chip cutter works best. Wider cutter won't try to wander off track, and side chip will cut it's way out of minor problems due to material moving from it's internal stresses. I'd use HSS cutter with radiused corners.
If it's crs, it may want to move alittle due to internal stress, but hot rolled won't be as much of a problem.
And, of course have the min amount of arbor unsupported.

It is a #2 cini.
Thanks for the info