It is known from the theory of metal cutting that an examination of machining chips provides the cheapest and the most effective way of understanding the machining characteristics of a material. The review of literature on machining of DRACs reveals that these aspects have been given relatively little attention during the machining studies. This viewpoint has provided motivation for the study of fundamental aspects of machining of composites involving chip formation mechanism experimentally and analytically. This paper discusses experimental work and finite element analysis to investigate the mechanism of chip formation during machining of DRACs. Focus of this paper is on understanding the influence of different cutting parameters on mechanism of machining. Chips generated experimentally and by finite element modeling during orthogonal machining of DRACs were used for this purpose.