Carbide Face Mill setup

[Lanmanb4]

I bought a HF 33686 Drill / Mill .. which came with a face mill .. The face mill uses 4 carbide tools .. not inserts .. tools .. actually they are cut in about half .. anyways.. I did try taking them out and putting a indexable insert tool in it with the same angles , etc ... just one .. and it worked wonderfully ... now to the question..

This face mill hold 4 of them ..
soooooooooo are they all supposed to be setup evenly? or staggered? or what??
May sound like a stupid question .. but I did ask it .. LOL ..

Thanks..

Randy

[vmil3]

Both the end and sides of the 4 cutters are set exactly the same, if not only the highest cutter will be doing all the cutting.

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Doug

[IOWOLF]

when i did mine years ago, I chucked it up in the mill and put a flat plate under it and set them to touch the plate.Also a small radius on each tool helps make for a smooth cut.

[psomero]

on a sort of tangent, at my old work, my boss made up a flycutter that used two hand-ground carbide cutting edges that were staggered by like five or ten thou. he claimed it reduced deflection that a normal single cutting edge flycutter induces, but he did some weird things for no apparent reason sometimes.

[moldmonkey]

Want another one? What I did with mine is throw it on the shelf and bought one of the r8 face mills that use TPG inserts. One note of caution on these the threads weren't tapped as deep as other R8 tooling, I didn't notice it and ended up shearing the key in the spindle .

To answer your question, IMHO I would try to set them all the same which would be a PITA.