Hi all,

Being a budget conscious home machinist with a mortgage I am quite frugal (yea OK tight) with my tooling. Rarely is any of my tooling from outside China unless I spy a good S/H deal that I like. So far my Chinese stuff (sourced from places like CTCtools etc) has served me well. However I must say that given I have never used expensive tooling, I probably don't know any different.

Recently, I have been getting a little disappointed with my Chinese endmills. Sure, they start out nice and cut nice but they don't seem to last very long before the cutting forces increase from loosing their edge and the finish suffers. Given that (at present) I only have a Chinese 45 size mill, my cutting demands are not very high and I tend to take small cuts due to rigidity issues with my mill so I'm by no means tough on my endmills. My cutting speeds and feeds are done by feel, sound and the chip colour and I tend to err on the conservative with speeds. I currently do not have the expertise to sharpen my endmills so once they are spent, they go into a box under my bench.

Based on the above, I'm thinking that it's the quality of my endmills that are letting me down.

So, where do people go to purchase reasonable cost endmills? I know the word "reasonable" is subjective so please humour me. I have looked on eBay for S/H endmills and there are many name brand for under $20. I assume they are used but re-sharpened. Are they worth a look?

I should add that I don't use coolant when milling but once I get the Pacific up and running I aim to since it has an inbuilt coolant tank and pump. Does coolant make a big difference to endmill life? Is it worth the mess?

Yea I know this is probably a little vague and so I am expecting some heat from some of our (shall I say) less tolerant people

Cheers,

Simon


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