I was at the WMTS here in Edmonton last week and three of the machine tool suppliers were running feedmills. Hass, Mori and Hurco. Of the three only the Mori was running at what I considered to be the correct feeds and speeds. The other two were way to slow and seemed a bit surprised at my suggestion that they could easily double the feed and increase the SFPM by 30%.
I came away realizing that feedmills are not well understood by many people and obviously allot of people are missing out on an excellent roughing tool.
We use feedmills almost every day where I work and have been fortunate enough to get free trail tools from Sandvik, Ingersoll, Tungaloy , Hitachi and Iscar. It seems we are the most willing to run at the suggested feeds and speeds so the suppliers are always bringing us the latest tools to break. We also find unconventional uses for their tools so we can give them good feedback to take to other customers.
A couple days ago the Hitachi guys gave us the latest Hitachi high feed endmill to try out and we happened top have the perfect job to try it on. The last time Hitachi came by we decided to try their 1 inch feedmill to shave some time off a slow roughing job and managed to cut the cycle time from 15 minutes to 7. Today I tried the new hitachi feedmill out on the same job and cut another minute and a half.
For those of you who don't use feedmills or don't know what they are here is a clip of the job I setup today using the new tool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVttPttIQZ0
Any one else use feedmills?