Actually, this is being done on a CNC knee mill. I am using a Tapmatic to shoot the threads for me. It's running a spiral flute tap which does a nice job of getting the chips out of the hole.
The way I finish the plate is to run my face mill across the top to clean up the surface after all the drilling and tapping have been done so the customer does not see those nasty swirly designs around the holes from chips off the drill bits. The trouble comes with the Tapmatic having about 5 inches of stick out which basically forces me to have to run that process on its own program and not integrate it in with the others because I must drop the knee to get enough headspace. So, what I have been doing is face milling the bottoms of all the plates first, then loading another program where I run a #7 drill bit, the 1/4" drill bit for the alignment pins and then the chamfer mill. each plate I will perform the tool changes for each plate so I do not have to dismount the plate. Then, when its time for the tapping work, I drop the knee, load the program, pop in the Tapmatic, get my Z height, and then proceed to tap the holes for each plate.
I have just found that the tapping will produce a fair amount of little stringy curly cues that like to fly everywhere. every time the op finishes, I blow off the plate, dismount it from the vice and then I place it on top of some paper towels and proceed to air blast the living daylights out of it until my OCD is satisfied. Then I blast off the vice surface and check really well for any little chips. Then, I load up the next plate and repeat the process... That whole air blasting and cleaning thing are taking me just as long to do as my tapping operation.
Here is a video of that:
YouTube
As can be seen in the video, a lot of these little curly chips go everywhere.
No VMC for me, Im just a little one guy shop right now
Just me and my BP R2E3.