Indexable Insert Grades?

Tooling catalogs.

Sandvik, Kennametal, and about a hundred other outfits publish them.

Mostly so their potential customers can pick wich tools suit their needs.

The internet might work too. You never know.

Cheers Trevor Jones

Hmm, the Kennametal site has interesting insert application guides, but I fear it assumes that you are a major manufacturer that already knows the grade and coating that you desire.

Other sites of a more general nature?

PS. To my surprise, Fastenal carries mach> Louis Ohland wrote:

The paper catalogs are the thing for this sort of lookup. Easy to scan through the various coatings and the assosciated charts of best applications and work out what the coating is best applied for.

Cheers Trevor Jones

here is one sheet to keep handy. There are several others if you search a little for them. The problem is that each carbide mfgr. has come up with its own grade numbers. C1,C2 C3........... don't get used any more. They were the standard grades.

John

I have been wading through the manufacturer's varied types, and C2, C5, C6... seemed simple. Then I got to the individual pages for the inserts and lost what was left of my mind.

I will be machining steel / aluminum / cast iron / bronze on a 700W X3 (max RPM 2,000, IIRC) and / or a 9x26 lathe. I haven't the horsepower to drive the wild stuff, nor are my machines solid enough to really drive the tooling hard. Nor do I want to.

Time to surf...

John wrote:

After you get up to speed on the grades of carbide there are the rake angles too.

Wes

Oh, yeah. The Kennametal Milling Technical guide

For more advanced parts, the higher rake angles and different insert shapes would hep with shock and finish.

Wes wrote:

It's called High Speed Steel. HSS for short.

Better stuff than any of the carbides, unless you have to deal with something miserable!

Cheers Trevor Jones

Problems with insert tooling for the HSM:

1. There is absolutely nothing simple about the vast array of base materials, coatings, sizes, styles, etc. of inserts.

1. Just about all the insert tooling was developed for serious production use on serious high HP rigid machines and performs poorly on HSM machines that can't handle the heavy cutting loads and speeds required for the insert to work to design spec.

So my recommendation is to go with the small amount of insert tooling sold by places like Little Machine Shop and similar that advertise in HSM magazine and deal only with the smaller machines. What they sell should be selected to have some chance of performing ok on said smaller machines. When you have that 60,000# 30HP machine, then you can experiment with the ceramic inserts and other exotic stuff.

Pete C.

Pete, what do you think about this strange insertable object. I am trying to decide if I have any need for it, and am concluding that the answer is negative.

My first guess is that it is a 1/2 insertable reamer.

thanks

i

According to Ignoramus30517 :

[ ... ]

I don't think so.

It looks more like a boring bar for use in a lathe. I would not expect the ground flat to be so far from the end for use in a boring head in a mill.

I would usually put it in a tool holder with a V-bottomed slot, and tighten one of the setscrews into the ground flat.

It looks like a nice bit of gear. The only thing which would make me like it more would be if it had a solid carbide shank, with just a short piece of mild steel silver-soldered on to accept the insert. (The solid carbide bars have less problem with chatter with a long extension of the bar. I've got one very nice tool of that sort, which I lucked into on eBay some years ago.

The mix of insert materials is nice too. I suspect that some of the un-coated ones have sharper edges and could produce a nicer finish with light cuts.

Enjoy, DoN.