[jprobst]

:drowning: :banana: (nuts)
when my boss bought our new haas vf-2 he got a tooling certificate with kennametal. we have about $1300 left on it and i really wanted to get some indexable end mill type tooling, i have four of there catalogues and its quite stressful. i'm still fairly new to this new and advanced equipment, could someone recommend what type to get? i mainly run .375,.5,.625 type endmills on 6061 aluminum making custom sandrail parts or making jigs to drill holes in the 1000 different parts for our customers. i don't want to blow it and buy a bunch of crap i don't need, i could use a chamfer mill, center cutting mill, a nice face mill(2.0) and so fourth, but there are so many options, (lead in, 0 degree, 30 degreee,positive 0 degree lead -in, its very confusing. any input would greatly be appreciated, thanks

[HuFlungDung]

For smaller diameters under 5/8" in aluminum, I don't know if there would be much to gain with using inserted endmills. The main reason would be the low number of cutting edges available in those small cutter bodies. You might find that you lose out on feedrate because you only have one or two inserts, versus 2 to 6 flutes on a solid carbide tool.

Iscar has come out with a line of insert endmills, with something like 4 inserts on a 5/8 dia tool. You might check them out, and then see if there is any kind of crossover tool in Kennametal. Iscar is good stuff, I think they maybe came out with the free cutting insert geometries first, and Kennametal may be playing catchup in that department. That is just my WAG, but I do like my Iscar tooling.

One potential advantage of insert endmills is in the extended reach type. Because the tool is solid almost all the way from one end to the other, you can reach deep cavities and holes that would be quite difficult to rough out with long fluted, solid carbide tools. In that sense, the long shank inserted cutters are indispensable, even though they may lack in flute number.

[dertsap]

might be a good idea of looking at their tf and tx carb drills if you do lots of drilling on large quantities of aluminum parts
time savings can be large over time

[Gduff]

If you havent found anything yet, you could go with a mill 1 14mm indexable insert. The inserts would be something like EC14... depending on what you want.

[M_D]

Kennametal’s KSSR200LF253 2” face mill is a good choice for 6061. For aluminum like 6061 you want a tool that uses inserts with a sharp edge, most of the indexable tools use inserts that are designed for cast iron or steel and do not usually give optimum results when cutting aluminum.

We machine lots of 6061, and primarily use .5” and smaller end mills. Even if they were free, I wouldn’t use indexable end mills very often in that size range on aluminum. We use mostly 3 flute aluminum cutting end mills, they are far superior for the application.

If you can’t find enough cutting tools, you might consider more tool holders and collets, it’s hard to have too many of those. If you get a Kennametal shell face mill, a good supply of inserts and a tool holder the biggest chunk of that tooling certificate will be gone. Kennametal tools are nice, but they are pretty proud of their tools and the prices reflect that.