Originally Posted by svenakela  I was milling pretty much graphite before, EDM probes. We didn't use any special mills as I remember, just standard TIN-coated HSS-mills and sometimes carbide mills.
Either keep the milling process under water or use vacuum, you can't even imagine how dusty it is. |
You can use coated carbide, but if you were to run a head to head performance test on both variations, you'd see the difference. I'll use the following as an example:
PCD-tipped countersinks, and non PCD-tipped countersinks, used in the aerospace industry. You'll see somewhere in the neighborhood of a 200-300% increase in tool life for the PCD-tipped countersink. Large companies such as "POCO Graphite" use PCD-tipped tooling in their graphite production process, just to give you an example. If tool life isn't a concern, then it won't matter. As far as evacuating the dust, there are several solutions out on the market if you are going to be milling. You are correct when you say that it's hard to imagine just how dusty it can get when machining graphite.