Guest Blog by Mark Donze at Fullerton Tool Have you ever wondered if you should purchase high-performance end mills or general-purpose end mills and what the benefit of purchasing one over the other is? If so, we have put together a list of factors to consider to help you make the right decision for next time. General Purpose End MillsFirst, let's discuss general purpose end mills. General Purpose (GP) End Mills are standard single, 2, 3, or 4 flute geometry end mills made for use in a wide variety of materials. Benefits of General Purpose End Mills:
High-Performance End MillsNext, High-Performance (HP) End Mills contain specialized geometries for a specific material being cut.
Benefits of High-Performance End Mills:
With this information in mind, if you are a company that does small runs in a wide variety of materials you may prefer GP end mills. Whereas, if you are making high-volume parts where cycle-time and up-time are king, you may prefer an HP end mill for your use. Remember, there are no hard lines drawn. Each application is different and preference is ultimately up to you, the end-user. If you aren't sure, you can contact your Fullerton authorized distributor to help make this decision. We will work with you to get the end results you desire with a wide variety of both GP and HP end mills available. We even have some tooling where we apply HP coatings to GP tools to help you get the most out of your cutting tool investments. We have a huge selection of inventory items and of course, if you need a special tailored tool to your specific needs, we have engineering and application knowledge to get the most out of your cutting tool budget. We also have resources on our website to help you navigate which tool is the best for your needs. Discover what end mills are recommended for your material and application by using the Fullerton Tool End Mill Selection Guide You can also explore and search for tooling by material, application, or tool specs as well as recommended speeds and feeds by series which you can access at the search button below.
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Looking for an end mill with unsurpassed performance in high-efficiency milling of Titanium? The new Fullerton 3116 TiMill end mill may be just what you need. Titanium is half the weight of steel and twice the strength of aluminum: It's a high strength, light weight material with excellent fatigue performance, super durable in high stress environments and corrosion resistant. As a result of titanium's material properties it's making it become evermore popular in the aerospace, defense, shipbuilding, medical adn dental industries. It's also what makes it considered a "more difficult to machine" material. Let's dig into that a bit more.
The trick to machining titanium has always been to keep consistent coolant flow to evacuate the chips and maintain a consistent chip load. Again, rough to your finish size. Don't let it work harden. That's what we've learned about titanium over the past couple of decades. There has been a ton of research on titanium's properties and that research has led to further refinement of the cutting tool geometry at Fullerton. The design of Fullerton's 3116 TiMill is based upon over a decade of aerospace testing and developmentand addresses many of the machining issues that Titanium presents. It's a 6-flute tool built with a 38°helix. The increased number of flutes allows for the tools to remain "in the cut" longer and more consistently. It doesn't induce as much heat as a lower number of flutes tends to do. instead, it's consistent. The 38°helix evacuates the chip at a more optimum angle than a 35°, 37.5° or 40° helix that predecessors made by competitors have tried.
It has an extremely high hardness, toughness and heat resistance which makes it ideally suited to keep the heat out of the core cutting tool in titanium applications. The 3116 TiMill 6-flute high-performance 38°helix end mill is stocked with FC-13 coating. Speeds and Feeds are Critical* IT'S MADE FOR TITANIUM! So that means it is NOT Recommended for High Si Aluminum (>10%), Low Si Aluminum (<10%), Composites, Plastics, Brass & Copper, or Graphite. NOT Recommended! Choose your Size |
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