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The nice Amazon man just delivered my new small size milling tool that for my machine is a suitable size for roughing mill scale material down in prep for further work.
It's an Accusize branded 1.25" diameter three cutter direct R8 shank cutter. Price up my way in Canada was $80. This is roughly $20 more than the two piece shank with shell style cutter.
I opted for this style the two piece options because the one piece design makes for a lot less tool overhang. Actually just 1.8" or 47mm as seen in the second picture just above. My thinking was that this diameter would be far more in tune with the size and weight of my mini knee mill. And certainly should be a LOT better than the laughable 3" four cutter jobbie that came with the mill. That one turns my mill into an opera singer with any but the lightest of cuts at lower speeds.
This one delivers! I squared up the block shown below with cuts from .005" to .025" running at a conservative 745 RPM. I fed fast enough to form proper chips rather than dust and all that happened was that metal was quietly converted to curly chips with no sound other than the motor and a slight sizzle sound as the inserts peeled the metal away. The silence was non music to my ears....
I did run into one pretty easily done "tune up". At first the finish was leaving a noticeable deeper groove mark that I could catch with a finger nail.
I felt penned the three tips and ran it back over a cut surface. One of the tips got polished a little stronger than the other two. I removed that insert and lightly polished the upper positioning taper on the seat just a whisker with a few dabs of a rubberized polishing cone in a rotary tool. The couple of tenths this removed did the trick and the swirl scratches were gone. Re-inking showed similar wear on all three ends. Running a fresh .007" off the previously done face gave the surface shown in the last pic above. The finish shows the sort of swirl pattern seen with many rotary cutters but now my fingernail does not catch at all. In fact it feels as smooth to my fingernail as the ground taper cone on the arbor seen in that same pic. A pretty fair trade for the fairly low cost for this cutter.
So for those of you like me that have mills that are smaller and lighter I can strongly recommend this as an option.
Next up is to order up some additional APKT inserts for both steel and the nicely polished and deeply cupped versions for aluminium. I might even go crazy and buy a second tool to hold the set of inserts for the aluminium.
CHEERS
BCR
It's an Accusize branded 1.25" diameter three cutter direct R8 shank cutter. Price up my way in Canada was $80. This is roughly $20 more than the two piece shank with shell style cutter.
I opted for this style the two piece options because the one piece design makes for a lot less tool overhang. Actually just 1.8" or 47mm as seen in the second picture just above. My thinking was that this diameter would be far more in tune with the size and weight of my mini knee mill. And certainly should be a LOT better than the laughable 3" four cutter jobbie that came with the mill. That one turns my mill into an opera singer with any but the lightest of cuts at lower speeds.
This one delivers! I squared up the block shown below with cuts from .005" to .025" running at a conservative 745 RPM. I fed fast enough to form proper chips rather than dust and all that happened was that metal was quietly converted to curly chips with no sound other than the motor and a slight sizzle sound as the inserts peeled the metal away. The silence was non music to my ears....
I did run into one pretty easily done "tune up". At first the finish was leaving a noticeable deeper groove mark that I could catch with a finger nail.
I felt penned the three tips and ran it back over a cut surface. One of the tips got polished a little stronger than the other two. I removed that insert and lightly polished the upper positioning taper on the seat just a whisker with a few dabs of a rubberized polishing cone in a rotary tool. The couple of tenths this removed did the trick and the swirl scratches were gone. Re-inking showed similar wear on all three ends. Running a fresh .007" off the previously done face gave the surface shown in the last pic above. The finish shows the sort of swirl pattern seen with many rotary cutters but now my fingernail does not catch at all. In fact it feels as smooth to my fingernail as the ground taper cone on the arbor seen in that same pic. A pretty fair trade for the fairly low cost for this cutter.
So for those of you like me that have mills that are smaller and lighter I can strongly recommend this as an option.
Next up is to order up some additional APKT inserts for both steel and the nicely polished and deeply cupped versions for aluminium. I might even go crazy and buy a second tool to hold the set of inserts for the aluminium.
CHEERS
BCR
Of the 30 something 4 flute end mill cutters I've got only two of them are center cutting and thus plunge worthy. From my perspective a facing only mill is shaped such that it can't do any side cutting. So something like 
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