What Factors Make Milling Successful

What are The Factors that Affect Cutting

To ensure the efficiency of the milling process, there are many factors to consider, such as using the correct milling tool, using the correct diameter and the appropriate number of teeth, as well as using the correct speed, feed rate, axial depth of cut and radial width of cut.

However, to ensure the effectiveness of tool applications, many more important factors are often overlooked.

How do Different Tool Cutting Edge Angles Affect Processing

The selection of the tool cutting angle is one of the important factors for successful milling.

Different leading angles have a very significant impact on the milling effect. If a 90° milling cutter is used as a face milling cutter, it is often just because it is easy to use, but its production efficiency or cost efficiency is not as good as that of a 45° milling cutter.

Using a 90° milling cutter to face mill parts instead of a 45° milling cutter reduces production efficiency by 30%, and production efficiency directly affects profitability. Compared with the 45° face milling cutter, the 10° face milling cutter has an increased feed rate because the chips are thinned to almost one-sixth of those of the 90° face milling cutter. A high-feed milling cutter with an entering angle of 10° can use very high table feeds because the chips formed are very thin.

For 45° milling cutters, these are usually the first choice for face milling because they balance radial and axial cutting forces well and provide very smooth cutting. These milling cutters have low vibration and are suitable for short-chip materials (such as gray cast iron), which are prone to chipping if the radial force is too high because the workpiece is getting smaller and smaller at the end of the cutting pass.

If a 90° milling cutter is used as a face milling cutter, it is often just because it is easy to use, but its production efficiency or cost efficiency is not as good as that of a 45° milling cutter. A high-feed milling cutter with a leading angle of 10° can also use very high table feeds because the chips formed are very thin.

The main application for 90° milling cutters is square shoulder milling. In this application, the radial force is mainly generated in the feed direction, which is most suitable for milling parts that are prone to vibration. In addition, the surface does not bear large axial pressure, which is very beneficial for milling structural parts or thin-walled parts with low strength.

So, what about round inserts? Round inserts are best for efficient heavy-duty roughing and general-purpose milling.

Round inserts are particularly suitable for processing titanium alloy and HRSA materials, but the effect is not optimal when pursuing high-quality surface accuracy. This is because the main deflection angle changes within the range of 0~90°, causing the cutting force to change with the arc cutting edge, thus causing the pressure to also change.

The unique performance of round inserts is that the chip thickness they form changes with the depth of cut – the smaller the depth of cut, the thinner the chips. Therefore, if the depth of cut is small, the feed rate must be increased to ensure appropriate chip thickness and improve production efficiency.

What UKO Can Provide

Choosing an accurate and appropriate main deflection angle can improve production efficiency. We would like to recommend our new grade of CNC milling inserts for you.

These two grades are with Balzars coating, our company is the biggest partner of Balzars in Hunan province. Let me show you the differences between these two new grades:

UP9015S: Workpiece: Steel and stainless steel, more suitable for soft materials

UP9115S: Workpiece: Stainless steel and steel, more suitable for harder materials Our new grades covered most of our milling inserts including APMT, R5, R6, BLMP06&BLMP09, LNMU0303, LOGU0303, WNMU080608…