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Watch Solutions for Hard Milling
Makino demonstrates the latest techniques and technologies for high-speed machining of hardened materials for die or mold applications. Check out tips, tricks, and new technologies you can use to mill the toughest steels, shortening your lead times, lowering your costs, and eliminating bench work.

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Welcome to the presentation on Solutions for Hard Milling. I'm Craig McQueen, machining center application team leader out of Makino's die/mold headquarters for North and South America located in Auburn Hills, Michigan.

First, let's talk about the benefits to hardmilling. One of the primary benefits to hard milling is the ability to shorten lead times. In shortening lead times what I mean is minimizing the time it takes to produce the part by being able to set it up one time and machine it from a hardened block. Based on the size of the part, sometimes it is not reasonable to do that. As an example, if I have a block of D2 or A2 material 10 inches square it is probably not reasonable to rough it from a hardened state - the block is just too big to hard mill efficiently. As the part gets smaller, maybe six inches or four inches or smaller, then I can set up the block one time from roughing from a hard state versus roughing it from a soft state. It would make sense to rough these smaller parts from a hardened state and save the time of sending it out to heat treat, bringing it back, maybe having to grind it because the part deformed or to stress relieve.

The second thing we are going to talk about is reducing secondary operations. Things like benching a part. Ultimately, if I can get to a highly accurate surface finish out of the machine I wouldn't have to polish. I want to get to the point where the machining is a high enough quality that the part comes out of the machine finished.

Completely eliminate jig boring when possible. If it is a dowel hole or a louver, maybe I can machine that part instead of having to go into a jig boring machine. Jig boring makes process time go up dramatically. Eliminating jig boring also reduces labor since I don't have to have somebody running another machine or spending time polishing a part.

We want to reduce EDM process time, even in 3D contoured shapes where there are straight corners. There is no endmill in the world that can cut straight corners, yet. But if we can reduce the EDM time as much as possible we finish all the areas we can and then only do the necessary operations for the EDM to straighten out or square up a corner where commonly we would leave a radius due to a ballnose endmill or flat cutter. So it is a culmination of the two - bringing the EDM processing and the high performance machining, combing them to reduce overall EDM time.