MARCH COVER STORY: New Year resolutions

For tooling specialist Seco, the early part of 2017 will see the company embark on two significant product campaigns – high feed milling and new additions to its Duratomic insert range. Dave Tudor reports.

Like many tooling companies in the UK, Alcester-based Seco is very much a total solutions provider rather than simply a supplier of products. It does sell a wide range of tooling ‘off the shelf’ directly and through an extensive distributor network but its real differentiator is the sheer depth of technical knowledge and expertise at its disposal.

Turnkey work is a particular speciality; Seco’s Technology Centre, with its vast array of machine tools and ancillary equipment never fails to impress. Here, new machining processes, or improvements to existing processes, are developed, prototyped, trialled and verified before final adoption by the customer. The Centre is also home to the company’s Custom Tool operation where – as its name suggests – bespoke customer-specific and application-specific tooling solutions are conceptualised, designed and manufactured.

The company has continued to make significant investment in digital technology by integrating its ‘My Pages’ portal into the main Seco website. My Pages features a powerful and easy-to-use search engine portlet called ‘Suggest’ that helps and guides even the most inexperienced user towards making the most appropriate and relevant tool selection for their machining applications. By simply entering data, when prompted, on the material being machined, component dimensions, tool type and machining parameters, Suggest will generate a list of ‘best fit’ cutting tool options. Users with a Seco account can then purchase the tools direct from the portal.

“We’ve invested significant resources into our new website and, in particular, the My Pages portal,” reveals Mike Fleming, Seco’s sales and marketing manager. “Our digital resources are valuable assets and they will be constantly evolving and improving over time.”

Building relationships

The tooling sector is particularly challenging at the moment but because Seco has nurtured close, longstanding relationships with key customers in strong market sectors like aerospace and medical, the business is well positioned to weather any storms that may develop. From an R&D perspective, much of Seco’s recent attention has been with the ISO S and ISO M materials – stainless steels, titanium and superalloys – that are prevalent in these sectors.

“Build rates on single aisle aircraft are definitely on the rise and that means ever-increasing demands to build lighter, faster, more efficient aircraft,” explains Jon Shipley, Seco’s technical manager.

John Shipley, Technical Manager

“Through our customers and their supply chains we get early visibility of evolving projects such as engine and airframe builds and while some of this work can take a long time to come to fruition, when you combine it with organic business it positions us well in the marketplace. For us it’s all about gaining a greater market share of the available business,”

Feeding time

As mentioned in the introduction, Seco will be focusing on a number of initiatives during 2017, one of which is High Feed Milling. Although not a new concept by any means, it’s an interesting technique because as a roughing method it actually involves taking shallow depths of cut. Its aim is to help manufacturers achieve higher metal removal rates and, as a consequence, reduce component cycle times and optimise productivity.

In essence the process involves employing shallow depths of cut using tools with large cutting radii and/or small lead angles to ensure that cutting forces, created during the machining process, are directed back towards the machine tool’s spindle in an axial direction. (Axially-directed cut-ting forces ensure increased tool and machining stability which, in turn, allows higher feed rates to be employed – up to 10 times the normal rate).

Even though High Feed Milling is principally described as a roughing strategy, with the right cutting tools, it is possible for manufacturers to create near net shapes in fewer passes and move from roughing to fine finishing – negating the need for, as well as the time and expense associated with, semi-finishing operations.

The process can be applied to good effect when machining a wide range of materials and it offers particular advantages when machining difficult-to-machine metals such as stainless steels, titanium, Inconel, hardened steels and superalloys, but it can also be used on less exotic materials like aluminium.

As such, High Feed Milling is used increasingly in the aerospace, medical and mould tool and die sectors. The term is a generic ‘catch-all’ description that includes a range of specific milling operations: face milling, copy milling, pocketing, helical interpolation, slotting, copying, plunging and even hole making.

The process itself is particularly beneficial when machining deep pockets with long tool over-hangs because employing a shallow depth of cut results in low radial cutting forces and virtually zero vibration which, together, ensure high process stability, increased tool life and improved productivity.

Peace of mind

“Because of its ‘forgiving’ nature, High Feed Milling is the first choice in unstable conditions, and/or where weak fixturing and low-powered machine tools are used,” Mr Shipley adds. “The process is pretty much bulletproof because you don’t need the best equipment to use it effectively. Not everyone has a £500k BT50 taper machine tool at their disposal and perhaps the best accolade I can offer is that whenever I leave one of our High Feed Milling tools and its respective cutting data with a customer, I drive away 100% confident that it’ll work – irrespective of the equipment it’s being used on.

“Reliability is the key aspect here; users won’t be taking huge depths of cut – the productivity is achieved through high cutting speeds, high table feeds and higher rpm and all the cutting forces are directed axially back up through the spindle. A welcome by-product of High Feed Milling is that it can actually help to prolong machine tool life in certain circumstances.”

Seco Tools provides one of the widest ranges of high-performance High Feed Milling cutting tools on the market (solid tools and indexable inserts), covering an impressive diameter range from 1mm to 208mm.

The range comprises a number of Seco’s proven and most popular milling tools and holders that include Jabro solid end mills, Combimaster, Minimaster and Minimaster Plus, Easy Shrink and High Feed 2 and 4, but it’s an ever-evolving portfolio of products, evidenced by the addition of two new series’: Jabro JHF181 solid end mills and High Feed 6 milling cutters with double-sided, six-edged inserts.

Ideal for machining small workpiece and cavities, JHF181 provides a specific high-feed geometry (in excess of 10m/minute) for machining hardened steel, superalloys and titanium and is available in diameters ranging from 2-16mm. The High Feed 6 (HF6) range consists of cutter bodies with fixed pockets and strong negative inserts with six cutting edges. HF6 tools have a wide application range and are especially suited for the machining of steels and cast irons.

“Working with Seco, manufacturers can incorporate and integrate High Feed Milling into their operations and, by doing so, achieve faster milling part process times – between three to 10 times faster – than when using conventional methods,” Mike Fleming states.

Evolutionary advances

Readers with long memories will recall that Seco’s Duratomic insert coating technology was a big deal for the company when it was launched back in 2007. In 2015, after eight years of extensive R&D, Seco created three brand new Duratomic insert grades – TP0501, TP1501 and TP2501 for steel turning applications – that were billed at the time as its biggest single product launch ever.

Proving that the art of insert/coating manufacturing is as much a science as it is a manufacturing process, Duratomic is significant because it involves modifying the coating at an atomic level by altering the crystalline structure of the Al203 outer layer.

 John McGhee
John McGhee

The result, according to Seco, is a tougher, harder coating that is able to dissipate heat much more effectively than anything else on the market. Now, the company is announcing new products in the Duratomic range – specifically the TP3501 grade – but there have also been subtle but significant enhancements to the existing grades as John McGhee, product manager, turning, threading and advanced materials, explains.

“Duratomic is constantly evolving but one of the biggest developments since 2015 is that we’ve introduced a ‘bumper’ behind the Al203 coating – achieved through removing cobalt flakes from the substrate – which affects the columnar crystalline structure of the coating at an atomic level,” he says. “The result is even longer tool life through improved heat-resistance characteristics. Another enhancement is through wet-blasting the substrate before coating which promotes better adhesion of the coating to the substrate.”

New family additions

A quick resume of the Duratomic grades and their application is probably pertinent here: it’s important to bear in mind that from a material/application point of view there is a degree of grade crossover but essentially: TP0501 is for the high-speed machining of high alloy steels; TP1501 is for the machining of low alloy steels using medium to low speeds and feeds; and TP2501 is ideal for machining a wide range of steels where unstable machining conditions exist and where heavy-duty, interrupted cuts are the norm.

However, the Duratomic family of products has actually always been about four grades but for logistical reasons, Seco decided not to release all four in 2015; not surprising considering there are some 1,200 variants across the TP0501, TP1501 and TP2501 ranges alone.

So, enter the TP3501. “This is new to the marketplace and behind its development is the fact that we wanted a tough secure steel turning performance grade that was also suitable for machining stainless steel at lower speeds,” Mr McGhee adds. “Compared to the other variants, it’s the most versatile grade and is better on small diameter bar work.”

But Duratomic technology isn’t just limited to steel grades. For machining cast iron, Seco has unveiled the new TK1501 and TK0501 grades effectively superceding the existing TK1001 and TK2001 products. Like the TP series grades, there is some crossover as the two new grades can be used for machining steel.

Complementing the cast iron grades is a new chipbreaker – the MR9. “This is for when more toughness is required during machining,” Mr McGhee concludes. “Primarily it’s for edge protection when taking intermittent, moderate to high depths of cut and high feed rates on castings for example.”

Seco Tools www.secotools.com/gb

Company

Seco Tools

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