Any Advantage of Insert Endmills?

[DR]

.................................................. .. the cheap APHT 11 or 16 inserts........................................... ............

I expect "cheap" inserts you see on eBay and other online sellers are counterfeit. Even those that come in what appear to be original name brand packaging. The Chinese have gotten very clever in this.

My favorite high positive milling inserts are Korloy brand, never what I would consider cheap. Now I see them all over for cheap. For light duty, hobby use the fakes hold up well enough.

[old mart]

Why counterfeit? The cheap ones are Chinese which have risen in quality by leaps and bounds in quality in recent years.

[eKretz]

Oh yes, counterfeits abound on eBay. I bought a very cheap pack of "Iscar" APKT on eBay to compare with a pack from MSC. The ones from MSC look leaps and bounds better in terms of coating quality and ground finishes.

[mikey553]

I expect "cheap" inserts you see on eBay and other online sellers are counterfeit. Even those that come in what appear to be original name brand packaging. The Chinese have gotten very clever in this.

My favorite high positive milling inserts are Korloy brand, never what I would consider cheap. Now I see them all over for cheap. For light duty, hobby use the fakes hold up well enough.

I have several boxes of cheap SEHT1204AFFN-X83 inserts from Ebay. They are for aluminum, no coating. Each box is sealed, says Korloy, Inc., made in Korea.
The inserts came from China and they do not look too bad. I did not use them yet on my face mills, so cannot say anything about quality. After I received them I asked the seller if they are counterfeit. He confirmed!

[old mart]

I have been waiting a month to get a box of 2.5mm inside er16 Trapezoidal inserts from China. Got them today, Descar brand made by Lifeng, in China. I have been on the lookout for years on several websites with no success. They will be used on the X and Y axes of the museum's Taiwanese drill mill, I am making some super antibacklash nut assemblies, and will be posting pics soon.
I have Kennametal inserts with "made in China" on the box, exactly the same as the USA, German, and UK made ones that I have. Also, Sandvik made in India and Japan as well as Sweden.

[eKretz]

Just coming from China doesn't mean they're automatically bad. Certainly some of the REAL brand name inserts are made there but they appear to have astronomically better quality control than the counterfeits.

[BCRider]

The only inserts I got until recently came on a cheap imported set of 3/8 shank tools with TCMT uncoated inserts. Those inserts chipped badly if looked at sternly. I never got more than a few minutes of use from any of the edges with anything harder than mild leaded steel.

A few months back I thought to try again so I got some cheap TCMT coated inserts off Amazon.ca just to try so I could use the same holders. Like $14 for 10 inserts cheap. These are head and shoulders better than the originals and I've even used them to good effect on my very tough to machine mystery steel that likes to work harden during machining in the blink of an eye if the chips even start to come off the cutting edge with some browning to them. I've chipped a tip or two but it was me doing some insert no-no's.

That led to buying a set of $20 for 10 of the ski slope shaped TCMT inserts for doing aluminium and other free machining non-ferrous metals. And as mentioned I tried using these for light finishing cuts on steel with excellent results. I'm not ready to ditch my HSS tooling but I'm finding that it's really nice to have some at least semi reasonable inserts on hand for some special jobs.

So I'm thinking that even the cheap imported inserts have come quite a long ways over the past few years.