Machinery_E
Titanium
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2004
- Location
- Ohio, USA
I'm getting into running cermet lathe inserts, and I'm amazed at the performance of cermet compared to carbide. I go for long tool life, and stable machining as most of the time its barfeed work and I'm working on something else while its running. For example I was just hogging these parts out of 4150R prehard in the Rockwell "C" 30 range. About .300" DOC, spindle load at about 80%. Ran about 70 parts. With one of the better grades of carbide I've found, the insert would be getting tired near the end of the run, finish would start to suffer, so would rotate it. Cermet still powering along just fine.
I've been thinking, why aren't there "solid" endmills made out of this stuff "commonly available" for general use? I do alot of milling with 3/8" endmills, and something that is so tough and wear resitant like the cermet in the lathe, would be a dream come true. I'm thinking it may be a matter of the cermet material not being "strong" enough? As a lathe tool has a constant load on, but an endmill has a sort of "pounding" action to it as each tooth engages/disengages with the material.
It does look like there are some solid cermet endmills, but they seem like a pretty specialized thing and not for general shop use as they have very short flute lengths. For example, on the 3/8" the flute length is 9/32", I'd need about 7/8".
I've been thinking, why aren't there "solid" endmills made out of this stuff "commonly available" for general use? I do alot of milling with 3/8" endmills, and something that is so tough and wear resitant like the cermet in the lathe, would be a dream come true. I'm thinking it may be a matter of the cermet material not being "strong" enough? As a lathe tool has a constant load on, but an endmill has a sort of "pounding" action to it as each tooth engages/disengages with the material.
It does look like there are some solid cermet endmills, but they seem like a pretty specialized thing and not for general shop use as they have very short flute lengths. For example, on the 3/8" the flute length is 9/32", I'd need about 7/8".