Hi MacDaddy:
I've milled a good bit of titanium in my time, and one of the first things I do when I see cutters being eaten, is to reduce the cutter surface speed.
Titanium is weird...if you go even a tiny bit over the happy SFM for the cutter, it'll get eaten in a heartbeat but it will happily run all day if you stay just below or right at that happy spot.
Before I learned this, I'd use up 3 or 4 cutters per part; now I can get ten parts out of one cutter.
A complicating factor is that you have an obscenely long stickout for your part...about 8:1.
The best solution I've found for this problem is to reduce my ramp angle so the cutter never sees a lot of side load.
Here's a partially completed Ti6Al4V freaky sex toy (don't ask) where I've ramped down into a slot with a 1/8" four flute carbide bullnose endmill about an inch deep.
My ramp angle is 0.75 degrees and my DOC is limited to 0.005".
The cutter has survived nicely for about 10 of these slots and was used for about ten surface finishing ops too, each of which had the cutter running continuously for about 4 hours.
It's still fine under the scope and I'll bet I can get another half dozen parts out of it before I lose the edges.
So if you can avoid getting too ambitious about making time on the part, you can get away with an awful lot...this is the kind of part where pushing it even a little bit is really counter productive.
So my inclination is to just let the automated robot noodle along at a happy pace and go do something else while it nibbles.
Of course that may really piss off the boss, so you might just have to tell him to go pound sand and then go look for a new job
.
Cheers
Marcus
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