End mill for titanium?

Recommended end mills for cutting titanium?

Hey Sway,

ApolloCrowe has a tutorial for the nomad where he used carbide3D’s brand of bits to cut titanium. His feeds/speeds and notes are here:

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Any of the carbide end-mills will work. Don’t use HSS, and you will need to use coolant. Apollo found a great way of doing that on his project. I normally use flood coolant on commercial machines when doing this, I don’t know how well the nomad would stand up to that (I don’t know how waterproof it is)

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I tried posting to this the other night but the server shut me out but I’ll try again. I’ve yet to try metals with my Nomad, but when I do I plan on using a product called AnchorLube on my cutter. This is a water based metal working lubricant. It’s is dispensed from a squeeze bottle ands imilar in consistency to mayonnaise. Titanium is also on its list of subject metals. You can go to their web site of the same name and request a free 2oz. sample if you want to give it a try as well.

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Hey Henry, Sorry I didn’t respond to your e-mail (busy as usual).

The problem with Ti, the material has a relatively low specific heat (kinda like carbide) so it doesn’t translate heat very well through the material, The problem is, heat will build up in the section you are cutting which causes that part to harden. This is part of the reason why Ti milling usually requires relatively quick speeds and feeds (you’re counting on material removal to remove heat) and/or lots of lubricant/coolant to remove any heat build up.

One thing that you need to look out for with both materials, is you want to avoid hot spots, when using carbide tools, if you go from no coolant to lots of coolant, you can induce thermal stress cracking in the material which ends up destroying cutters rather quickly. Titanium is a tougher (but softer) material, so it ends up getting harder to machine via this process.

I’d be interested to see how this material you have works for this process, my first thought is you wouldn’t get good material cooling (lack of flow) where you would with the otherwise-watery coolants that are used for this purpose. I ordered some of the chemical, my main business at the moment is deep-drawing applications, which can require some exotic lubes, most of them are mineral soaps, or zinc salts, I’ve thus far avoided oils, it takes too much effort to clean up.

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