Rough justice

Over the last 18 months Ceratizit claims it has achieved notable success in the aerospace industry with its MaxiMill 211 family of indexable insert shoulder mills – particularly in the area of medium/rough milling of titanium, Inconel, heat resistant stainless steels and other exotic materials.

Central to this success has been the arrival of the new CTC5235 and CTC5240 insert grades that feature a special carbide substrate where the binder is doped to achieve excellent heat resistance without loss of toughness, and Ceratizit's own HyperCoat-C CVD coatings. Ceratizit has also paid close attention to insert characteristics and the specially designed –F40 geometry is helping to ensure that on difficult-to-machine materials these new grades are performing well.

“These new inserts are attracting attention from the aerospace sector as the improvements in tool life and productivity are providing genuine cost saving benefits throughout the aerospace supply chain,” says Nathan Paxton, key account/technical manager, Ceratizit UK.

Following the success of the original MaxiMill 211-11 shoulder and end mills range with 11mm (XDKT 11T3…) inserts with corner radii from 0.4mm to 4.0 mm, Ceratizit is now adding larger 15mm inserts (XDKT 1505…) and a family of long edge milling cutters for both insert sizes.

The long edge milling cutters are already generating productivity improvements by allowing much larger depths of cut and providing excellent tool life when machining titanium (in excess of two hours between insert changes in some applications) with cutting data of typically 60-80m/minute and feed rates/radial engagement selected to provide undeformed chip thickness of around 0.10 to 0.13 mm.

They are said to be ideally suited to component features that are otherwise slow and difficult to machine such as pockets and external walls on large titanium forgings with very variable depth of cut and large turbine blade forgings with heavy stock removal.

Ceratizit
www.ceratizit.com