mkd, I think I have seen one of those pitches before at IMTS. From my understanding I think there was a valid point. If I seen the same pitch I think they were saying that buying a cheap tool is more expensive than you think. Reason being is sometimes your machine $/hour rate ends up costing you more overall dollars for a part if you are running very conservative. If your cutter is $100 and your hourly rate is $100, and you have 3 hours tool life to cut one part it costs you $400. If your cutter is $300 and your hourly rate is $100, and you have 1 hour tool life to cut the entire part, it still costs $400 for the part, but in the same time you got three parts done versus one. I agree that hogging cutters are still a great way to remove material, but times change, high performance cutters pay back their own price, and then some. The same goes with new NC programming toolpaths such as dynamic mill. There is a learning curve and maybe additional costs, but the more you use them the more they pay back. Also, if you ran a 20mm tool at 400-500 sfpm and 0.006" radial depth of cut in titanium, but only achieve 60 seconds of tool life...??? Where you using coolant???? Parameters such as this are everyday for dynamic mill in Ti64 with 60-90 minutes of life even at 0.040" radial depth.