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

im sure it can be done. but for qty 4 and the hole being kind of tight as far as size, true pos and the in line callout...edm is a great deal.

Im in Nor cal. but ups makes eveyone just a few days away right?

anyone interesting in quoting a .625 thru hole 10.0" long in 1045?

I started out at my house. we are on a little bit of land and have a very nice 2000 sf building with dual 16ft roll up doors built on a 3ft thick slab. perfect for what i wanted to do. then the planning department changes there stance. so now im about 1.5 miles away from home. not the 100 yard walk back to the house...but still about the same amount of time...i dont walk to fast

My thoughts: I started a shop about 10 years ago. ( in my late 20’s ) bought a brand new mill and a used CMM right out of the gate. Kind of like you I had plenty of contacts in other shops and had all the work I could handle. Things were going very well for the first year. I probably worked 60 hours a week and enjoyed every minute of it. Shortly after it all came to an end. Looking back now I can pin point exactly what went wrong. It was the wrong time and place in my life to be a shop owner. The demanding hours, the responsibility that comes with the overhead and wearing many different hats lead to my relationship dissolving right in front of me without me noticing it. I was so driven to succeed It was as if I had blinders on and couldn’t see anything but the shop. One might think this is the reason I sold out to another shop, but it wasn’t. back to the right time and place thing…. It was who I was at that time and who I was in a relationship with that was the end. Fast forward 10 yeas and I have someone very special in my life and a new born son. I started another shop last year and just bought another new mill to keep up with a small but growing customer base. Like Bob said, you are never too small to do thing right. We Use NX so we also have part templates with everything from 6 toolex vises with every configuration of jaws we stock all the way down to adapter plates for lang vises mounted to our 4th axis all 4th axis and fixtures use a simple dowel pin and bolt method and everything gets a 1x1 grid for flexibility . We stock a fairly large tool cabinet that is easy to identify and re-stock out setup sheets always shown the entire machining assembly for clarity ( doesn’t take more than 10 minutes if you do it correctly) We use inspection templates designed to inspect one feature every tool makes for quality control. And our cutting tool library is extremely accurate for specific holder / projection and machine we program for resulting in very few edits and maximizing MRR even though we may be making one part. We use a resident tool library to speed up setup time. ( I probably wouldn’t but a mill with less than 40 ATC for this reason) We do not run production, instead focus on one off’s and R&D work the bigger shops don’t want to touch. Again like Bob said take every job you can get and be ready for any job you may encounter. We have taken a lot of work from other shop lately by being prepared for quick turn around and producing above and beyond quality. Yes you will work harder than you ever have before. I don’t know if you will reap the reward….Im still waiting to on those! We invest every penny back into being more productive so I’m still a broke struggling shop owner. But if you believe now is the time, then I believe there is no better time. Good luck!!!!!!

We are looking at getting either the Accu Lube or one of the Unist Coolubricator or revolutions MQL systems. I don’t have any experience with these as we usually just use Air blast when mill steel ( 1018 up to 4140 ) I would like to have it set up with an M code for on off and everything I have read makes this seem possible. Im just looking for someone who uses them to point me in the right direction ( how many pumps / nozzels you run) do you use it for everything including drilling ect or do you switch between MQL and flood coolant depending on the part / application. We do not have TSC plumbed on this mill so the system will be external.

Thanks Bob

Hey Bob, I just picked up the smaller lang 5 axis vise #74065. care to share any idea's about mounting to a haas hrt210 4th axis? Damian

Its been a long time since I have used mastercam. Somehow I undocked the operation manager and it appears to take up both monitors. If I hit alt O then it goes away and I can see the part / screen again. Is there a way to re-dock it? Dragging it back to the original locations dosnt seem to work. I also tried to delete the mcamx config file. It made a new one, but still has same issue. Thanks Damian

Great artical. Hone looks like the way to go! Thank you!