CASE HISTORIES OF MANUFACTURING PROBLEM SOLVING

Conventional wisdom holds that round inserts are good for rough milling because of their stronger geometry. But a tripling of edge life and a 3-to-1 reduction in cutter count on a tough, cast steel milling job at Harrison Steel Castings Co. (Attica, IN) proves there are always exceptions to every rule.

An integrated foundry, Harrison achieved the productivity gain using tangential milling. In this technique, pioneered by Ingersoll Cutting Tools (Rockford, IL) in the 1960s, the inserts lie flat around the cutter's periphery. Re-orienting the inserts aligns the stronger insert axis with the main cutting-force vector. Ingersoll's latest iteration ...