Face mills, inserts....

"Removable pocket"

If you crash it, it's toast.

Six inserts is a pretty setup, you can fill one, two, three or all six stations.

Suggest stay away from five and seven pocket units.

That cutter takes a 20 degree positive rake square insert with hole, which is very common...I run the same system in most of my mills but with no hole, exception being I also have a couple cutters that take 25 degree instead. They have negative radial rake and positive axial rake which greatly reduces machine horsepower requirements per cubic inch of metal removed...the geometry works surprisingly well in most steels also, despite the weak edge that a 20 degree rake insert presents, but it is important when cutting steel to use the correct insert grade and to also use a feedrate that produces a chip thickness that is considerably thicker than the edge treatment or hone...for aluminum or plasitcs, you should make sure and purchase un-honed inserts otherwise you'll needlessly suffer from excessive burr formation.

You can drop either the 1204 or the 43 number out of the insert designation; they are confusing things in the Shars catalog by listing their inserts using both ISO and STD nomenclature at the same time.

--You might also consider buying a Sumitomo UFO off of Ebay--they have all the same advantages when cutting softer materials but even more so, but as they use a 25 degree insert instead of 20 degree, you'd be using SFxxx inserts instead of the SExxxx series.

Well, this was for a lathe, not mill, but what I did is search eBay for somebody selling what looked to be a lifetime supply of inserts, and then bought the holders for them. I paid something like $1.25 per insert for some really nice ones, and got a reasonable deal on the holder set.

So, you might try searching eBay for likely style and size inserts and then search for a face mill that takes the same insert.

Jon

Shars also has inserts. I have some Shars stuff including a 3" face mill. (5 insert triangular though). Shars overall seems to be slightly better than the average Chinese Import. Certainly good enough for brute force work. I have a couple of their screwless vises, one dial indicator (which was great until I dropped it) and a few other specialty tools. I'ld probably get laughed out of a real machine shop, but they do ok for me.

I ordered extra inserts from Shar's at the same time as I ordered my face mill, and I made sure the part number was on the box so I could order more if I needed to. I wish I had found a 6 insert face mill when I bought mine, so I could run two or four inserts if I needed to, but the five will have to do.

Good luck.