Kyocera cutting tools, any opinions?

[Bruce Caulley]

Ahoy,

I haven't been involved that much in the machining game for a few years and as such haven't been keeping up with the latest and greatest technology. It used to be part of my job to monitor what the tooling companies were up to and take advantage where I could.

 

The company I am at now has just bought a large 50 taper VMC and I have been asked to recommend some tooling for it. I usually resort to Iscar, with a little Mitsubishi thrown in, but a few years ago I started to have some surprising results from some Kyocera products. I never did explore their range fully to see just what they had to offer, but where an insert was recommended by the rep as being suitable it usually out performed other bigger names. Having said that their "generic" grades were pretty ordinary.

 

The company is leaning towards Iscar, but the Kyocera rep, who also sells other stuff to this company, wants a chance to get the gig. (I have known both the Iscar and Kyocera reps for years and they both bend over backwards to help so I can't separate them on service)

 

The machine will only be cutting mild steels and BIS wear plate in small runs of medium sized parts. Nothing exotic or complicated, but we will be aiming to blitz what gets done.

 

I guess this is a long way of asking: Is anyone else using Kyocera and having good results?

 

Thanks

 

Bruce

[Mr. M]

I used the circuit board drills that Kyocera offers with great success, but that is what my experience with them is limited to.

[Rotary Ninja]

Yeah, small tools from them here as well. They did the job just fine though.

 

In steels we use Garr or Hanita 5-flute with very good results. Most other shops I worked at used Garr as well. I know this isn't what you are asking, but not having experience with larger Kyocera I can't really say.

[Tim Johnson]

The only thing I know about Kyocera is that they bought out what started as OTM from Kennametal. OTM had great aluminum insertable cutting tools but decided to make everything in house which is fine but somehow they torqued the makers of the OTM inserts off and they quit making the inserts 6 months before Kyocera could begin to be ready for production. Obviously that made a big mess for the former OTM users (us) and we bought every insert we could which was about a two month supply. We grabbed other suppliers' inserts that would "fit" the OTM cutters to hold us off until Kyocera could get production going but when they did their inserts were crap. They tried again but never got close to OTM's quality so we dumped them.

 

They have great ceramic chef's and paring knives though.

[cunder]

Using the 10 edge insert face mill here. Edge life is good.