.500 inserted cutter?

[mackie29]

I am looking in to .500 flat and ball inserted cutter and .750 ball

Currently use Harroun. Tested Ingersoll Backdraft .500 .032r blade and Iscar .500 .032r Giong to test Millstar next week . Anyone have any opions it is for highspeed and convental machining. The millstar is like 1/2 the price and the rep says the other three cutters are no better. This is starting to get confusing with all the different cutters out there. Any help would be great.

[78nova]

What material are you cutting? Steel or aluminum?

We do most of our aluminum milling, with as we call them, Ski-Carb End Mills.

Solid carbide end mills set up in shrink fit holders.

We use Fullerton end mills, www.fullertontool.com

We do most of our steel milling ( 15-5 stainless ) with A-Symmetric solid carbide end mills set up in shrink fit holders.

We use Hanita end mills, http://www.kennametal.com/en-US/.../...nds_page.jhtml

Carbide insert tooling has places where it OK for some situations.

In our shop we get far better tool life and reduced run times using solid carbide.

For example, we were using .500 & .750 ingersoll insert end mills and we were just burning through inserts cutting the stainless.

We replaced these cutters with the Hanita solid carbide end mills and reduced the run times in half easily and in some cases 3-4 times faster.

Insert costs, time to stop and rotate, slower feeds and speeds along with the initial cost of the cutter and if you blow out an insert you can waste the insert pocket.

We send our dull end mills out for re-sharpen to extend overall tool life and to help reduce cost.

Happy milling

Kenny

[Cmailco]

A lot of people make the mistake of pricing the tool, rather than the process. Don't be one of those.

Other options – yeah I know you need more – are screw-on tools but it's tough to say what might be best without talking about the types of milling operations you do the most, materials, surface finish requirements, tool holders, machine, CAM software and programming capabilities. That last one being a biggie.