radial-insert face mills with more robust inserts than the incum- bent; only the Ingersoll cutter was tangential. “We had used tangential mills in past years with success, but wanted to be sure we were looking at the latest model’s time,” said Smith. Over the course of several months,
the comparative tests were run under identical conditions on both the “prob- lem” cast iron housings and another part made of compacted graphite iron (CGI) that was posing the same problem. “We try to be brutally objective and strive to optimize each individual process,” said Smith. “We don’t have a preferred tool vendor, and we’re very cautious about general-purpose tools that provide conve- nience and tool count reductions at the expense of effi ciency in each cut.” Technical support representatives from the candidate companies were invited in to advise. At the end of the day, the tangential Ingersoll S-MAX face mill came out on top, not only for improved process security but also for higher throughput and lower annualized total cost. Following tool selection, Bohn worked machine-side with Smith’s team to optimize the parameters. This led to a fi nal change to a tougher insert that extended edge life another 15%. Test results achieved with a tougher 6" IN2015 grade tangential cutter with 10 inserts with four edges per insert increased parts per edge to 152 compared with 60 parts per edge for the incumbent 6" radial cutter and 132 parts per edge with the next best alternative, also an Ingersoll cutter. Cycle time for both Ingersoll tangential cutters (IN2005 and IN2015 grades) was reduced to 0.60 per part (min), and tooling cost per part was reduced from $1.33 per part for the radial cutter to $0.24 and $0.21, respectively with the two Ingersoll cutters.
“The most important result was the complete elimination of sudden edge failure, leading to a more secure process,” said Smith. “The throughput savings were of course wel- come, but more as a dividend. You can’t easily put a price on
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