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Best aluminium mills money can buy?

ricardo_gt

Aluminum
Joined
Aug 5, 2012
Location
Portugal
I have several machines that will work exclusively 6061 aluminium in the next 2 years.
Machines have 25000rpm spindles and oil/air coolant mix.
I am trying to buy allways to the same brand because i will need to get the max profit from the machine, tolpath machining (mastercam) and tools.
So far, WNT or YG1 are the ones i think it can do it great. SECO have niagara and/or jabro but to machine steel, not the greatest at alumimium if compared to YG or WNT...sandvik or any other fail at the same i believe. Or am i wrong? Please, give me a ligth on your thaugt. Thank you.
Best regards!
 
For finishers, Destiny Tool gets my vote $$$ on this down to 1/8", under that Harvey. For roughers it depends on tool diameter but 1/2" and under Garr is hard to beat for performance and the price is damn good.
 
I have had amazing results from SGS (now Kyocera) S-carb end-mills from 1/2" down to 1/8" in 6061.
This is my swiss-army-knife:

Capture.jpg

There is one in every mill. They last seemingly forever. And, they freakin' JAM!
 
I give a double thumbs up to the YG-1. Said screw it and bought some with an amazon gift card figuring they would be junk, and to my suprise they blew my mind. Never even heard of them before... The tool life is very very good and finishes are always great. Ive been almost exclusively been using the YG 3/8 and 1/2 uncoated 3 fluters for the last few months months.
 
The very absolute best money can buy?

Fraisa or Emuge.

I think they are dramatically overpriced though, even though they are very very good. Like the Emuge AluCut with the TSC in the gullets mentioned above? Those bastards are really $150... do they remove 3x the material of a Destiny Diamondback? Nope!
 
I run a LOT of 6061 parts and have vary good luck with YG1 alu-power for finishing and lakeshore Taz roughers ... if its not a job with a lot of removal I use the onlinecarbide ZRN mills,,,

A big part of working with 6061 is not just spinning fast .. I hand code 100% of my production parts and have found I can save a lot of time by cutting at a lower RPM but watching how it feeds and a lot of time I well change feed rates on just about every line in the program ,,, I would never think of using a cam program for a production part ,, Cam has its place with one off or short run parts but I have never seen a cam program yet that I could not save a large percentage of time by hand editing it or just starting by hand and writing it .. I learned for my self that starting by hand is faster in the long run and easier ..

just last month I spent about 50 min writing notes on a program I have ran for a few years and edited the hell out of over that time ,, I looked at all my notes and pulled out the drawing and started from scratch and about a day and a half later I have a program that runs just under 34 min ... That is a "huge" savings and has made it so by Wednesday evening I have done what would have taken tell friday evening ...

Bottom line is ( time = money ) and well you can save some money on tooling there is a lot better places to try and save money. Were talking 6061 and any good quality cutter well run for days if not months ...
 
We do tons of alum work, For years I was sold on Garr Alumastars. seems like the endmill would cut forever except the sharp corner would break down. last year I tried the niagra alum endmills corners last 3-4 times longer than the alum stars( but there also 50% more in cost). My customer recommended I switch over to s-carbs . I havent tried them yet they say they are cheaper also.
 
Like the Emuge AluCut with the TSC in the gullets mentioned above? Those bastards are really $150... do they remove 3x the material of a Destiny Diamondback? Nope!

You're right about the MRR not being 3 times that of the other guys but the tool life seems to be a bit better and for deep slotting the through tool coolant is worth its weight in gold.
 
I like International Minicut. They’re HSS so they don’t last forever, but with TSC they can sure remove some metal.
 
I can see there`s lot of options...thank you for your sugestions, i apreciate that.
We machine mainly aluminium tube with complex cut geometry, 4, 5 and 6 axis. That`s a production line, the same cut/patterns 15000 to 20000 times. A single mill can do it without breaking on multiple machine operations.
I need tools that can be very strong at the flute length because cuting wear is the mainly problem i have to keep tolerences.
 
What does everyone think of Lakeshore Carbide? I run them and am happy but I do not push them hard.
 
Another big plus for Destiny Tool Vipers, the Diamondbacks are meh IMO, is they come in SO many flute lengths so you can get exactly what you want. They last very long, the sharp corners never chip, and I find the surface finish is as good as Harvey 5 fluters at the same feeds. Like so much else the "best" depends on your needs, so there is none really. Those Harvey 5 fluters are worth having on had since that thick core and all those flutes make for a very stiff free cutting mill for deep pocket walls.
 
I can see there`s lot of options...thank you for your sugestions, i apreciate that.
We machine mainly aluminium tube with complex cut geometry, 4, 5 and 6 axis. That`s a production line, the same cut/patterns 15000 to 20000 times. A single mill can do it without breaking on multiple machine operations.
I need tools that can be very strong at the flute length because cuting wear is the mainly problem i have to keep tolerences.

At those volumes and complexity, you stop buying off-the-shelf tools and start calling Maypal, Kyocera, Sandvik and the like to start getting custom PCD inserted tools made.
 








 
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