i ended up going with the seco. im going to use 3 bodies. high fee, 90 deg ( for walls ) then the ball. with inserts and a carbide shank it was under 3k. not too bad for how deep im going.

Specv, that is very close to what I need. I should have mentioned I need a 1.0" ball head to finish the btm section. iscar and seco have something close... but the longest combo I can see is 11.78. I also looked at millstar.

6061 alum I have to cut a pocket approximately 2.0 x 4.0 x 11.25 deep with a full rad on the floor. ( from the side it would look like a U shape ). The c/r are .750 with a small flat in between. Anyone know of a an insert cutter with extensions that could get that deep. Im thinking a 1.0 or 1.25 high feed mill or inserted ball end mill. I would like to rgh and fin at the same time. Add an extension and go deeper…repeat as needed.

thank you for all of info and 1st hand experience suggestions.

thanks for the info guys. like I said, never done this type of work before and was more wondering what the industry standard / flow of operations were. I would love to finish it all, then heat treat and grind, but I think its safer to try and hard mill the critical features.

Material is A2 1.250 x 6.5 x 14.25 Mill 1.00 thickness to +.015 Mill complete less threaded holes and 4 x .5000 slip fit hole ( note many dimensions have a +/- .001 tolerance ) Heat treat to rc60 Grind top to get all edges sharp Thread the holes and ream the 4 x .500 slip fit Any thoughts on this. It’s not really something I have done before, but it could open doors for more work down the road. Thanks, Damian

Not sure who isnt being truthful here, But the customer has decided to cover the tooling and extra run time. so i just spent a good chunck of change on a high feed mill, inserted thread mill, and thru tool carbide drills. atleast i know what im up agianst now. just have to execute.

so all the certs looked corect. I took the material back to the customer and they check it also 47-48 RC. the sent it back out to get annealed agian. check it this morning...........still at 47-48 RC. has anyone ever seen anything like this? im questioning what type of material this actually is. its been a rough week and it looks like only getting worse

per the note on the print: Material: 4340 per AMS 6414 annealed condition

Jeff, Im the sub on this one. just asked for the certs........havent heard back......crickets.....

hardness test is showing RC 48-49. much higher than i expected with the annealed state.

I tried the lower SF yesterday. glowing ball of death was the result. Im sending the material for for a hardness check. somthing isnt right. i tried using a file on it to a rough guess at harnedness, and the file will not even leave a mark on it.

Thanks guys. I will give it a shot.

thanks for the sugestion. No i dont have a way to check the hardness. i was using 60 sf for the drills. i will drop that down also. I just talked to the local tool rep and he mentioned running it wet. any thoughts on that?

Im not familiar with this material. It is customer supplied and everything I can find say it’s around Rockwell 40. We are seeing poor tool life while dynamic milling. The chips are coming of red hot and look burnt. I tried dropping the SF and it’s the same. Below are the parameters we started with. Any suggestions would be great. Also can’t seem to drill using cobalt will switching to carbide help? 40 taper Milling chuck .500 5fl coated endmill 1.250 loc SF = 1105 IPT = .0042 Rdoc .035 Adoc = 1.00 rpm = 8437 feed = 177 Entry = ramp @ 1 deg with 50% reduced feed and speed Thanks, Damian