face mills

[dian]

there was some talk a while ago about face mills being expensive so i thought i would share this.

i recently bought some 40 mm face mills from aliexpress for a small mill. they were around $15 each. i also got five different grades of inserts for $8-12 a pack. they are beautiful tools with a silverish satin finish. the blue one is aluminum.

im not saying they a suited for 24x7 use, but threy do their job well. i also got a 80 mm version for $30.

[polaraligned]

Curious why you would need so many?

[small.planes]

One for each mill
More likely one for each insert grade he bought

[oxford]

Is that blue one using a square insert or the odd corner of a ccmt insert?

[BCRider]

Is that blue one using a square insert or the odd corner of a ccmt insert?

I've seen those in my own shopping. You can see one of the square inserts mounted in one of the positions. They are square but unlike a turning tool the corners are clipped. So more of an irregular octagon. The width of the flat corners combined with the radius at the points should give a nice wide cut and by extension a very nice finish.

[tomato coupe]

The inserts seem to be one step removed from an outright forgery of Kennametal products.

[J Tiers]

The inserts seem to be one step removed from an outright forgery of Kennametal products.

They came from aliexpress, what did you expect? Worse than the Seoul "thieves market".

[Doc Nickel]

In my comparatively brief experience using carbide inserts to any real extent, I've found there's a HUGE difference between the "real thing" and a no-name or knockoff.

Hey, I'm not rich either. I'm pretty sure I get paid in crushed beer cans and expired Hardees coupons. But I also know how long a $12-a-pack insert lasts, and that's slightly less than a politican's promise. The first batch of a honed DCGT inserts I got for a lathe turning tool, disappeared rapidly. Small production run, the edge would crumble within sometimes as little as 10-12 parts.

Also just got a DCxx boring bar as a main cutter for my gang-tool lathe. Crashed the first tip I had in it, (the last of the above batch) and bought a moderate-price pack to replace it. After a very few test parts and thirty 'real' parts, the tip has noticeably worn. And that's in a rigid CNC with flood cutting oil.

On the other hand, a few years back I got a Glacern R8-shank facemill that takes SEHT honed square inserts. Got some real Kennametal to go in it, nearly $10 each. I'm still on the first corner of each of the first five inserts, despite probably more than six or eight in-cut hours on aluminum, on a manual, hand-crank mill, with that tool, and it still gives me near-mirror finishes.

Yeah, there's places you can save money in this biz/hobby, but there's also times it's often worth splurging on 'just a bit better'.

Doc.

[LKeithR]

I've seen those in my own shopping. You can see one of the square inserts mounted in one of the positions. They are square but unlike a turning tool the corners are clipped. So more of an irregular octagon. The width of the flat corners combined with the radius at the points should give a nice wide cut and by extension a very nice finish.

They're an SEXT style insert, the "S" denoting a square profile. Bear in mind that when it comes to
milling inserts there is far less standardization than what you see in turning inserts. It's getting to the
point where more and more inserts are specific to only one manufacturer.

[LKeithR]

In my comparatively brief experience using carbide inserts to any real extent, I've found there's a HUGE difference between the "real thing" and a no-name or knockoff.

Hey, I'm not rich either. I'm pretty sure I get paid in crushed beer cans and expired Hardees coupons. But I also know how long a $12-a-pack insert lasts, and that's slightly less than a politican's promise. The first batch of a honed DCGT inserts I got for a lathe turning tool, disappeared rapidly. Small production run, the edge would crumble within sometimes as little as 10-12 parts.

Also just got a DCxx boring bar as a main cutter for my gang-tool lathe. Crashed the first tip I had in it, (the last of the above batch) and bought a moderate-price pack to replace it. After a very few test parts and thirty 'real' parts, the tip has noticeably worn. And that's in a rigid CNC with flood cutting oil.

On the other hand, a few years back I got a Glacern R8-shank facemill that takes SEHT honed square inserts. Got some real Kennametal to go in it, nearly $10 each. I'm still on the first corner of each of the first five inserts, despite probably more than six or eight in-cut hours on aluminum, on a manual, hand-crank mill, with that tool, and it still gives me near-mirror finishes.

Yeah, there's places you can save money in this biz/hobby, but there's also times it's often worth splurging on 'just a bit better'.

Doc.

Exactly. Cheap is nice but virtually all of the cheap inserts I've tried have not stood up like brand
name stuff. There's a reason you pay more for the good stuff.

And on another note we really shouldn't call them "carbide" inserts. The metallurgy of inserts today
has moved way beyond the simple definition of carbide...

[old mart]

The inserts seem to be one step removed from an outright forgery of Kennametal products.

Not really, there are part of a very large generic number of shapes. This is safer to buy because most manufacturers sell them.

[tomato coupe]

The inserts seem to be one step removed from an outright forgery of Kennametal products.

Not really, there are part of a very large generic number of shapes. This is safer to buy because most manufacturers sell them.

The shapes aren't the issue. Check out the blatant ripoff of the Kennametal logo and use of "Keencuteer" for the name.

[J Tiers]

The shapes aren't the issue. Check out the blatant ripoff of the Kennametal logo and use of "Keencuteer" for the name.

An odd mixture of things to "copy", but then, they may have been picked off a list of "good names".

Not the least bit surprising for the chinese 3rd and maybe 4th (5th?) level suppliers. I've seen far more direct chinese copies, of my own employer's products, right down to the brand, model, corporate logo, corporate address, and "xeroxed" PC boards, complete with our supplier's mark. It would have been difficult to prove in court that we had not made them.

The more obscure levels of the chinese economy are "interesting".

[Jim Stewart]

I've seen far more direct chinese copies, of my own employer's products, right down to the brand, model, corporate logo, corporate address, and "xeroxed" PC boards, complete with our supplier's mark. It would have been difficult to prove in court that we had not made them.

The more obscure levels of the Chinese economy are "interesting".

Nothing new.

It was 1961 or '62. I was working at Tektronix in Beaverton, calibration department where we took the scopes from the assembly line, made them work, and fine-tuned them. In those days all the scopes (with the exception of the near-experimental 321) used vacuum tubes. Lots and lots of them.

One day I came up to my workstation to see a strange scope on a cart in the aisle. It was a perfect copy of our 535 dual-timebase scope except for the Japanese name on the front. Knobs identical to ours, same for the typeface on the panel, identical except for the name and the slightly different color.

We hooked it up to power and ran it through its paces as if it were one of ours. Identical.

No more jokes there about "cheap Japanese imitations".

Dunno if they ever produced it in quantity...

-js

[J Tiers]

The copies of our stuff were not very good, and ruined our reputation in china. Sales dropped from millions to nothing.