Video: Quiet Heavy Milling of Titanium

Stephen Eckersall, group engineering manager in the U.K. for toolholder maker Nikken, recently shot this video to capture the sound—or the lack of sound—of heavy milling passes in titanium using newly developed tooling. Specifically, this video shows the combination of a new toolholder design from Nikken and a new end mill for titanium from Technicut.

Technicut brought Nikken in on the development of its new high-metal-removal-rate tool for titanium, because the cutting tool maker was seeing minute axial sliding of the tool within various toolholders from high cutting force. Nikken’s response to this problem was a new toolholder design able to restrain the cutter against this movement. Read more about the resulting tool and toolholder combination.

The video, which was shot at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre in the U.K., illustrates how quietly the new tool and toolholder perform together. Mr. Eckersall provides these details:

• Toolholder: Nikken X-Treme Multi-Lock milling chuck
• Cutting Tool: 25-mm-diameter Technicut TiTan six-flute end mill
• Machine: Starrag Heckert HEC1600 horizontal machining center
• Spindle: HSK100A
• Material: Ti64 aerospace titanium billet 165 mm in diameter × 65 mm tall mounted on a 90-degree angle plate.
• Application: Three full-width slots—25 mm wide × 50 mm depth (one pass each slot cutting upwards from bottom of billet)
• Speed: 445 rpm
• Feed Rate: 214 mm/min.
• Coolant: Through tool at 120 bar plus flood supply around tool