[ejparrott]

As a turner, I'm a bit out of my depth when it comes to milling, but as I'm also a model engineer, I need to get up to speed!

I'm converting my bridgeport clone to CNC, and I'm moving in to tipped cutters. I've been offered a new 50mm face mill for a very nice price, but I don't want to jump in and buy it if it turns out I can only buy one manufacturers tips for it. At work, we only buy tools where we have a choice of manufacturers, so we can buy the cheapest tips avaliable at the time of ordering, regardless of maker.

The tips it takes are MITSUBISHI APMT1604, is there an equiviliant to this? The closest I've found so far are taguetec APKT's, but no proof of whether they're the same. Can any one shed any light?

Thanks

Ed

[fizzissist]

If CHEAP is your criteria...
Why should I waste my time giving valuable advice based on years of production experience?

Go buy your cheap tools. We'll be waiting for your entertaining subsequent posts asking why your tools aren't lasting very long, the finish is lousy, the dimensions are all over the place.....

I love laughing at guys like you.

[ejparrott]

If CHEAP is your criteria...
Why should I waste my time giving valuable advice based on years of production experience?

Go buy your cheap tools. We'll be waiting for your entertaining subsequent posts asking why your tools aren't lasting very long, the finish is lousy, the dimensions are all over the place.....

I love laughing at guys like you.

Thank you for that rather arrogant and decidedly unhelpful response. You either don't understand the question, or you have failed to differentiate between buying cheap inappropriate grades as to buying lower costing equivalent grades from a different manufacturer. Maybe you're the person who only buys Sandvik inserts because they are perhaps the biggest manufacturer with the biggest marketing department? CHEAP is not my critera, flexibility is. why would I spend £200 on a tool body and 20 inserts, only to find that I can only use one manufacturers inserts which cost three times those of other manufacturers. I'd be better off spending my £200, maybe £50 more, on another manufacturers body, but I can buy tips from 3 different manufacturers for the same tool. This week company A might have the cheapest grades of tips on offer, next week, company C might have its tips on offer. If there's an equivalent grade, I buy the cheapest IF it'll do the job I want. That extra £50 soon disappears in the savings I make from the options of tips on the market.

What if I told you my company is pretty much turning its back on Sandvik because their inserts are just silly prices for what they do, and we're swapping to other manufacturers for better value for money. We swapped almost all the turning inserts years ago for the likes of Kenametal and others. I can turn a 3m shaft with a Hertel CNMG tip equivalant to a Sandvik grade at 3mm depth of cut at .35mm/rev at far less cost - with no lose of spindle or increased tip usage speed before you try that one. We had a Manganese alloy job to do recently on the milling section, which Sandvik, Seco and Mitsubishi tips refused to look at, but Tageutec tips cut fine, making 9 times the distance the Sandvik tips did. The guy who does the majority of our tool ordering has over 50 years experience of the job - he's not about to start buying cheap tools to save the company money when those cheap tools don't do the job. Maybe you think I'm going to try using, I don't know, for the sake of argument a 4025 grade tip to turn an Incoloy or Titanium shaft - ain't gonna happen, I know that, I'm not stupid.

The question is not about grades, its about standard ISO tip codes. Take my shaft example for arguments sake. If the Sandvik tip cost £10, and the Hertel insert which is identical in all aspects (in fact I believe the ones we use are better) costs £5, would you buy the £10 tip or the £5 tip?

Let me rephrase the question so you can understand it.

Is there another ISO tip size equivalent to Mitsuibishi APMT1604?

Oh and by the way, you won't be getting any entertaining posts about lousy finishes or poor performance either, for the simple reason I know how to read tip codes and how to play with speeds and feeds to get a tip to cut correctly. That is a question of tip grades and tip loadings, not of size.

[osphoto]

ejparrott, great response.

Being a novice home shop, when I purchased used face mills, I did home work before making that purchase. A cheap used face mill doesn't mean cheap cutters. Specially when that cutter only uses one manufacture and that manufacture isn't selling the cutters any more!

Good to know I'm doing something fairly right on my purchase criteria when my budget is certainly limited.

[ejparrott]

ejparrott, great response.

Being a novice home shop, when I purchased used face mills, I did home work before making that purchase. A cheap used face mill doesn't mean cheap cutters. Specially when that cutter only uses one manufacture and that manufacture isn't selling the cutters any more!

Good to know I'm doing something fairly right on my purchase criteria when my budget is certainly limited.

The likes of evilbay are full of cheap used facemills. They're cheap for a reason, usually because you can't get tips for them, I looked at one the other day and didn't even bother 'watching' it, Sandvik listed it as obsolete.

Work frequently buys tool lots at auction, for the back ends normally, and in a box of 5 you frequently get random tooling. We put them in a corner for a year or two, and if we find nothing else we scrap them. Recently a lot of tooling brought in some more bits for a Sandvik Varilock system we had in the corner, we now have a decent set and can think about using it, so that turned out in the end. Our shaft lathe has a 4-way tool post, and in one of them was an old Sandvik quick change tool holder, now obsolete. Its fine as long as you want to use the holders we've got, and we can always put 32mm shank tools in the other sides of the toolpost, but we have a £3k/month tooling budget so we can afford to buy a £100 tool if we need it. At home I have a £100/month budget, and that has to be shared between the workshop, my model engineering, and the Land Rovers. I need to make the right choice the first time, so I need tools where I'm not tied to one tip manufacturer, so I don't have to buy a new tool when they decide to stop making tips!

Flexibility is the key