Titanium Machining

Plunge-And-Sweep For Finishing Corners

Machining animation from Boeing illustrates effective techniques for titanium workpieces.

Video: Finish-Milling Titanium With A 20-Flute End Mill

A tool with many flutes can be effective for achieving a productive metal removal rate in titanium, where speed and chip load are constrained. See how quickly the chips accumulate in this video.

Application Research For More Efficient Aircraft Machining

A cutting tool supplier describes how application expertise is applied to improving productivity in aircraft-related applications

Alternate Tool Material For Hogging Large Workpieces

Shops often use either carbide or high speed steel cutting tools for hogging out the large workpieces common to the aerospace and moldmaking industries. While both materials have their advantages and disadvantages, cutting tool manufacturer Precision Cutting Tools says powder metal combines the best features of both.  

The New Rules of Cutting Tools — Rule #3: Diamond Shouldn't Be Rare

Consider PCD or CBN wherever capacity is tight.

Turning The Tough Stuff

One of this aerospace shop’s many specialties is producing ring-shaped parts that are thin-walled, complex, tightly toleranced and made of difficult-to-machine materials such as Inconel, titanium or high-temperature alloys. Turning jet engine parts doesn’t get much tougher than this.

Machine-Ready Blanks Allow Immediate Production

Striving To Be Partners, Not Shops

The two divisions within this business machine complex parts for the medical and aerospace industries. So in that sense they’re shops. However, in order to grow with their customers, they realized they had to be more than just providers of good parts. They needed to serve as their customers’ manufacturing partners.

Applying A High Speed Machining Discipline Without The Speed

In this shop, high speed machining makes sense at 4,000 rpm. While the disciplines the shop put in place made a new 15,000-rpm profiler dramatically more productive, high speed machining would have remained valuable even if the new machine never came. Acoording to a co-owner of this shop, high speed machining has no need for speed.

Get Better Before You Get Bigger

Rather than making a major new machine tool purchase just yet, this shop is finding additional capacity on the equipment it already has. What once was a vertical machining center will become a flexible automated production center for unattended machining.