Talk:Endmill

Cutter material and sharpness when cutting aluminium

Under "Applications" using pre-dulled endmills when cutting aluminium is mentioned. From my experience aluminium and other soft materials benefit from very sharp cutter, often favoring HSS over solid carbide. Any thoughts?

Depends on the application and how much you're willing to pay for the tool. Most manufacturers and end users have moved away from using HSS in favour of using carbide, for rigidity and speed of machining. With carbide, most roughing tools have sharp ODs and deep flutes to provide chip evacuation (this helps especially in very soft, sticky aluminum); finishing and super-finishing tools will (again, typically, not all tools are like this) have a polished cylindrical margin to eliminate things like chatter on very thing walls and roping in the corners of parts. So yeah, these tools definitely exist. OSG, Garr, YG, De Boer... they all have tool lines with this sort of geometry. --207.245.6.123 (talk) 12:36, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Didn't the name "endmill" originally (19th-c.) differentiate endmills from through-arbor milling cutters?

To anyone knowledgeable about the history of machine tools: Isn't it true that the name "endmill" originally differentiated endmills from the general superset of through-arbor milling cutters (which the arbor passes through)? I'm talking about back in the 19th century when most and possibly all milling machines were horizontal milling machines with the arbor supported by bearings on both ends. In an environment where that configuration was the norm, cutting with the end of the milling cutter would be a novel notion worthy of a different name. I am not going to enter this into the article at the moment because I'm not knowledgeable enough about machine tool history to be sure. Alas, I wonder if this is something that falls into the epistemological category of "The only people who knew the whole story on that are dead now and didn't write any books about it before dying". Lumbercutter 19:26, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I don't know about the 19th century stuff, but I've done some research and, ball nose cutters are sometimes referred to as "ball nodes end mills". Rocketmagnet 08:24, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Proposed merge into "Milling cutter"

• Support merge into "Milling cutter". — Lumbercutter 03:23, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

I see

So what are profile milling, tracer milling, face milling, and plunging? 81.131.10.165 (talk) 11:19, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

• Answers given in order of simplicity:
  • Plunging is feeding the endmill axially. In the typical 3-axis XYZ coordinate system, where Z is the vertical axis, this means a Z-minus (-Z) movement. In other words, the same feeding motion that you'd give to a drill bit. This makes sense when you consider the general sense of the word "plunge".
    • Endmills can generally be classified as center-cutting or non-center-cutting; center-cutting endmills have tooth geometry near their center that allows the workpiece to be cut there, thus allowing axial (plunging) feed.
  • Face milling is milling across a (relatively wide) flat surface (that is, a face) of a part with a relatively shallow depth of cut. The goal is cleaning up, or lowering, a planar surface ("face"). What the word "relatively" in the recent sentence refers to is aspect ratio rather than any absolute distance threshold. In other words, it's meant qualitatively rather than strictly quantitatively.
    • Any endmill can perform a face milling operation. But a short aspect ratio (length:diameter) and plenty of flutes is the ideal. Thus the ideal milling cutter for face milling is one with many flutes (thus many teeth), a large diameter, and a short length. On such cutters (called "face mills"), center-cutting capability is anywhere from secondary to irrelevant, depending on the specific case.
    • The term "facing" is used in both milling and turning practice. In both cases, the goal is creating a face, that is, a (relatively wide) planar surface.
  • Tracer milling is milling whose toolpath is controlled by a tracer stylus. This method of reproducing contours (also called profiles) predates NC and CNC; before we could control the toolpath "by the numbers", we had to trace a physical model (also called a master). A lot of diesinking (cutting of die or mold cavities or cores) was done with tracing in the era of the 1860s through 1960s. Today tracing is commercially extinct, having been replaced by CNC. A few tracing machines are still in existence, but tracing is essentially an antique method now.
  • The term "profile milling" has several senses, owing to the way machining technology has evolved over many decades.
    • The simplest sense, as you might guess, is the milling of a profile—that is, the milling of a contoured surface, as opposed to one that is only flat or stepped.
    • But there is more to the connotations of this term. Keeping in mind that milling with the periphery of the cutter historically predates milling with the end of the cutter, one can understand why, back in the era of about the 1860s to the 1930s (no precise dates), the term "milling" by itself had a prevalent (although not exclusive) sense meaning milling with the cutter's periphery—what is also sometimes termed "side milling". When you are within the mental framework of that sense, you can then stand up in contradistinction to it another term which would refer to milling with the end of the cutter. To many ears 100 years ago, "profile milling" (or "profiling") was that term that stood for that contradistinguished sense—for the simple reason that, back then, the milling of contours in a diesinking fashion was the archetypical application of such cutting action. Not the only application, but the main one that easily sprung to mind. This is why vertical mills were sometimes called "profiling machines" or "profile mills".
      • And of course, to bring things back around to an earlier discussion point, tracer mills were the kings of profiling mills, because their toolpath was automated. This was back in the days when automating a toolpath via NC and CNC did not yet exist.
    • So, to tie together the various senses of "profile milling", consider this: one could call form milling with the periphery of a form cutter "profile milling" (because it is the milling of a profile), but the narrower sense of the term would be reserved for milling the profile using the end of the cutter (thus an endmill, either square or ball-nosed), and generating the contour via toolpath rather than via cutter form. The archtypal example is diesinking.
• Hope this helps, and is interesting. — ¾-10 00:15, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Geometry and tools

"See graph for common values." No graph present 212.159.59.5 (talk) 11:20, 12 November 2013 (UTC)