Shrink fit holders and extensions often come with a big through hole.

Its primary use is to allow the shank be knoked out from he back should the tool ever snap off. It is also used to supply coolant for CTS machines.

Unfortunately said hole affects rigidity of the holder making it more likely to chatter leaving bad surface finish and badly affecting tool life.

There is however an old trick to prevent or minimize the chatter.

All you have to do is pack that hole with some thick grease.

Don't forget to cap off the oppening so that grease does not escape when the tool is spinning.

Here are several photos of surface finish before and after grease application. All cutting parameters were exactly the same in both cases.

before. deep chatter marks after. surface finish is ideal tool in extension holder showing capped hole

We all have manufacturer speed & feed charts and have used their recommendations.

But sometimes those charts just don't apply.

For example manufacturer charts assume you are using their endmills at a certain stickout length, flute length and at a certain depth of cut.

But in the real life you rarely match all these conditions.
Sometimes you need to use longer endmill. Sometimes your flute is longer than what manufacturer gave you speeds and feed for.

What i am trying to say is that whenever your real life conditions differ from "normal" you "need to adjust accordingly".
In fact this is what is printed below many charts.

Too bad not many sources tell you how and what to adjust.

While failure to adjust cutting parameters often leads to chatter, poor surface finish and even tool breakage, one of the biggest mistakes people do when machining is Read More 

I often read how somebody is suggesting other people to use TiAlN coated tooling for machining aluminum alloys.

I even see that coming from developers of other cnc speed and feed calculators who should know better.

Wake up people and stop misinforming your users.

TiAlN coating is NOT FOR Aluminum!

HarveyTool application chart

The best online cnc speed and feed calculator FSWizard is now available as an app for iPhone and Android.

CNC Milling and Turning Speed and Feed Calculator For Machinists on the palm of your hand!

Go To FSWizard Online Calculator

Note: Certain HSMAdvisor Licenses Include FSWizard PRO For Android for Free!!
Check out our HSMAdvisor Web Store for Details

Absolutely the best handheld CNC machinist's speed and feed calculator around.
Calculate cutting conditions simply by choosing your work and tool material.
No need to know any numbers. 
FSWizard will automatically use recommended cutting speed and chipload.

* Made by a machinist for machinists * 

Improve productivity and optimize cutter life.

* Milling, Drilling, Tapping and Turning
* Suggests optimum cutting depth and balances cutting parameters.
* Supports Chip thinning and HSM machining.
* Required Power estimation, Recommended Depth/Width of Cut for extra-long cutters.
* Built in tap drill calculator to calculate not only cutting speed and feed , but also drill dia in accordance with desired thread engagement.
* Drill and Tap charts for both imperial and metric systems.
* Oblique Triangle Calculator
* Fillet Calculator will find tangent points to a circle and two lines
* Machinists Bolt Hole Circle and Line Calculators

It just does it all.

*Milling Tools: Solid EndMill, Indexed End Mill and FaceMill, Solid and Indexable drills
*Drilling Tools: Jobber Drill, Hi-Performance Parabolic Drill, Spade Drill, Reamer
*Turning Tools: Profiling and Grooving

Please try the Free FSWizard Lite first to confirm your device capability.
Also huge thanks to those who go through the trouble and leave a review.
Good reviews mean more sales and more incentive for me to further improve on this app.

FSWizard Lite and FSWizard PRO are iPhone/Android machinist calculators that do not require internet connection.
PRO version has all the latest material lists and speed and feed technology.

Lite version has all the same features, but it only has tool steel, mild steel and aluminum in its material list. It still has all the tool types and tool materials found in online and standalone versions
Both Lite and Pro  versions have unlocked tapping data.

Lite versions have limited geometry calculators.

This app is intended not to replace but to complement my much more powerful standalone Windows application called HSMAdvisor.

FSWizard LITE Free
FSWizard PRO $49.99
FSWizard PRO $39.99 Multiplatform License for iOS and Android Purchase through PayPal

2013-07-06_15-51-40.png 2013-07-06_15-51-50.png 2013-07-06_15-52-04.png 2013-07-06_16-03-27.png 2013-07-06_15-52-51.png 2013-07-06_15-52-27.png Fillet Calculator Oblique Triangle Calculator Pipe Taps New Layout Bolt Hole calc Bolt Hole Line Calculator Bolt Hole Particial Calculator SHCS Reference 82Deg FHS Reference

This release features some pretty major updates and features.

First of all, Tool deflection model has been radically improved over previous versions.
Now model fully considers not only the flute length, but also depth of cut and how it affects deflection!

No other speed and feed calculator alows you to do that.

Calculator now helps getting full advantage of those Hight Axial engagement toolpaths.

New things

• HSMAdvisor can now print!
  For now you can print a screenshot of application window. Make sure to select "Album" layout in your printer settings, otherwise portion of the window may get cut off.
  Tool library printing is next in line to be done.
• User Library Export and Import in XML format is now available.
  You can use it to back up your tool library and share library files with others.
• Library Tabs are now right-clickable by mouse- this allows to right click on the library tab and select desired action like "Delete" "Merge" and "Rename".
• Speeds for some tool and stainless steels have been revised.
  Couple of materials were added.

Things updated and improved

• Improved tool deflection model.
• Improved and fixed machine and tool limits trigering.
• Creation of new Tool or Cut now forces newly-created tool/cut to get loaded, so you dont have to search it from the drop-down list- it becomes active right away.
• Viewing and editing of tool/cut info in myCutDB page now does not close opened tool tree.
• Tool material and Work Material are now a single column. Its called Tool&Work Material and it shows tool material for Tool rows and work material for Cut rows

HSM or High Speed Machining is becoming more and more popular each day.
Many of us have seen those youtube videos where endmlls remove large amounts of material at high speeds/feeds.

While definitions of HSM may vary between tool manufacturers and even individual shops, the physics behind it remain the same.

In this article i would like to explore flat endmills.

HSM is not about ramping up your speed/feed overrides to 200% and puling out your smartphone to record another youtube-worth video.

What is HSM?

HSM is a complex of programming, machining and tooling techniques aimed at radical increase of productivity.

Programming

The cornerstone of HSM is low radial and high axial engagement of an endmill with the workpiece.

There are many CAD/CAM systems that allow you to create HSM tool-paths. Mastercam's Dynamic milling and SurfCAM's Truemill are some of them.

When radial cutter engagement with the material is smaller than the radius of the tool an interesting thing happens.
Chip load- the distance the tool advances per cutter revolution per tooth- does not equal the actual chip thickness anymore.
Chip thinning mainly happens at radial engagements below 30% of the diameter.

In order to get compensated chipload you need to multiply recommended by manufacturer chipload by the chip thinning factor.

Usual Radial Engagement for HSM toolpaths however is between 5 and 15%.

Axial depth of cut varies depending on geometry, but Read More 

Radial Chip Thinning HSMAdvisor Screenshot

Sevaral weeks ago i saw a post on CNCZone.

A HSMadvisor user Peter Neil used it to calculate cutting conditions for cutting a block of pre-hardened stainless steel.
His machine was Tormach.

Here is an exact copy-paste from that forum post:
_____________________________________________________________________________________

Did a test cut on the Tormach today using feeds & speeds from the latest version of the excellent HSM advisor.
To make it interesting, I did the cut using some 1.2085 pre-hard Stainless Steel as I have plenty of stock of it and have a job in mind for this, and wanted to see how it cut on the Tormach.
The material is like a stainless P20, at 16% Chrome/1% Nickel & 0.5% Sulphur (which makes it slightly free-er machining) and is hardened to around 33-35 Rockwell C, so I used the HSM advisor guidelines for machining P20 rather than Stainless. Cutter was a 10mm 4-flute Carbide TiAlN coated EM.

So...... ticking the HSM/Chip thinning option I got a speed of 5120 and feed of 2214mm/minute( 87 IPM). I used a DOC of 10mm and WOC of 0.5mm/0.020" - and turned off the flood cooling to machine it completely dry. The finish pass on the 1st level was 15mm DOC and 0.5mm WOC and slightly lower speeds/feeds.

Loaded up a 40mm x 63mm block , pressed the start button, and it went from this....





...to this!

Read More 

This HSMAdvisor v0.200 release is a major step forward.

Aside from major rewrites that i did to improve stability of the code there are also new features that will improve user experience 
and move us one step ahead towards making it the best tool for machinists. 

New Features

• Circular Interpolation feedrate compensation
  Now you can get compensated feedrates for milling inside and outside round features.
• HSM and Chip Thinning 
  are now two separate check boxes.
  Chip thinning allows to compensate for thinning chip thickness at low radial and axial engagements.
  HSM allows to increase cutting speed when chip thinning occurs. 
• Manufacturer's Speed and Chipload input
  For when you need to enter manufacturer recommended S&F values.
• .NET 2.0 Framework 
  Starting from this release i have downgraded required framework version from 4.0 to 2.0
  This will allow us to target wider audience as it immediately drops requirements for Windows computers.
• UNEF and UNS threads
  New thread sizes were added into the Threading section. 
• Drill Chart 
  was expanded to drills up to 1.5" in diameter

Bugs Fixed

All the existing bugs were tackled when code re-write happened.
I took a long time testing and fixing all of the problem and suspect areas, so at this poing it should be bug-free.

HSMAdvisor_v0.200 program picture.JPG

HSMAdvisor v0.1 is now available.

(newest version is 0.101)

A decision has been made that updates containing new features will increment by 0.1 each time

Bug fix updates and improvement updates will increment by 0.01

This should be a hint that first fully commercial release is in sight. (you still have another 6 months or so of free updates).

There is only one major feature

• Machinery with gear boxes is now supported- users can enter a list of RPM machine can have set and FSWizard will force all calculations to stick to those pre-defined numbers.
  There is a sample machine called "Manual Lathe" that demonstrates this feature. You can use "Import" function in Machine Definitions dialog to load that machine and see how it works

Several bugs have been fixed

• Manually entered RPM for lathe tools have been fixed
• Minimum RPM entered in Machine Definitions dialog now actually forces FSWizard to not go below that value and generate a warning.

How Sticky RPM works:

• Create new machine in Machine Definitions by clicking Add button and giving it a name you would recoginze.
• Fill up all of the input boxes including Min and Max RPM, Horse Power and Torque.
• Enter list of RPM values your machine supports into the Power Curve table.
  (Note RPM values HAVE to be in incremental order)
• Against each RPM row enter the max Horesepower your machine has (because its a gear-box, machine HP value is constant at any spindle speed)
  Tip: if Max torque was unknown, now you can enter the highest value you see in Torque row.
• Check Calculations Stick to pre-defined RPM only check box (Yes i know the picture shows that box unchecked, but you have to CHECK it)
• Check Use Horse Power Curve Compensation check box

Thats it!

Now FSWizard will force calculated RPM to match the closest RPM value from the table.

Sticky RPM

This release is a major step forward.
We are starting to wander away from just Speeds and Feeds calculator part of the project.

Version 0.022 was a little buggy.

All reported and known bugs have been fixed.

New update version is 0.023

New features:

• Threads page: You can now get thread cutting and tapping data for most popular threads in north America (UNC/UNF/ISO).
  The list of supported threads and features will grow according to necessity and user feedback.
• Machine Profiles now have 2 new buttons: Clone and Import.
  Clone button simply copies selected machine definition with a different name.
  Import button is needed to be able to update/add machine definitions from default machine list. As users modify and customize their Machine List, thay are now able to add machine definitions hassle-free from default_machines.xml file that is supplied with every update.

Bugs Fixed:

• Sticky Ball nose check box

• Max HP improperly rounded

Additions:

• Thanks to Greg Jackson and Matt Doeppers from Tormach i was able to create Horse Power/RPM curves for Tormach PCNC770 and PCNC1100 models (if you install over previous version, you can use import function to add those machines to the list)

Threading Machine Definition Import