“This application demonstrates clearly how trochoidal milling reduces the stress and heat involved in cutting. Despite that fact that we used much higher speeds and feeds than in normal slot milling, the wear on the cutting tool was very light."

--- Richard Klein, applications manager, OKK USA Corp.

Cutting narrow pockets in hardened steel has long been one of the most difficult machining tasks, and the challenge is even greater when the slots are deep compared to their width, as this increases the difficulty of evacuating the chips.

OKK, a machine tool builder, U.S. Union Tool, a cutting tool manufacturer, and DP Technology, maker of ESPRIT® CAM software, teamed up to solve these problems by taking advantage of the trochoidal machining capabilities of ESPRIT.

DP Technology recently added a special routine for trochoidal milling to its ESPRIT Mold software, a routine that reduces the amount of time required to produce a CNC program for trochoidal machining.

Upon machining a challenging part programmed in ESPRIT, “trochoidal milling demonstrated the ability to substantially improve productivity of slot milling operations,” said Jonathan Hay, vice president of sales and marketing for U.S. Union Tool. “Normal practice when machining a slot is to feed at a rate of about 20 percent of the rate used in normal side milling. Using trochoidal milling, we were able to increase the feed rate to about 80 percent of the normal side milling feed … “

Open the attached file to read the full story, which appeared in the October 2008 issue of Cutting Tool Engineering magazine.