An Article about Cutting Performance of Ball Nose Endmill.

Ball-end milling cutters are 360 DTH hammer cutters with similar blades that are assembled on a milling machine to mill various curved surfaces and arc grooves. Ball nose milling cutters are also called R cutters, which can mill die steel, cast iron, carbon steel, alloy steel, tool steel, and general iron. They are end mills. It has a wide range of applications in industries such as mold manufacturing, automobile manufacturing, aerospace and electronic communication products.

Ball end mills are generally manufactured by grinding, and the sharpening is a very critical process in the production. At present, there are two main types of sharpening methods used in China: one is to use simple sharpening equipment; the other is to use imported expensive RTCP sharpening machine tools for sharpening.

The most significant feature of ball nose end mills is that the end eccentric drill bits edge (ball edge) of the main cutting edge is an “S”-shaped space curve.

Classification of ball endmills.

According to the material, it is divided into: high-speed steel ball end mill, cemented carbide ball end mill, CBN ball end mill, etc.

Based on the structure, there is two categories: cylindrical and conical ball end mill. Cylindrical ball endmills are divided into straight shank and tapered shank cylindrical ball end mills; conical ball end mills are divided into straight or tapered shank Conical type.

In the market, we can also divide it into indexable ball end mills, integral ball nose mills and chip-mounted ball end mills.

Advantages of ball nose endmills.

Ball end mills are point-contact machining, so the machining surface accuracy is particularly high, and it occupies an important position in the CNC machining of molds and free-form surfaces. Through its structural analysis, it can be concluded that the S-shaped ball endmill has the following advantages:

(1) The ball edge of the ball end milling cutter can be used for axial feed or lateral feed. It can easily process the cavity surface of the mold and other complex curved surfaces;

(2) The ball blade is an S-shaped arc blade, and there is no sharp corner part on the blade, which will not cause local concentrated wear, and the tool has high durability;

(3) During milling, since the ball edge is an S-shaped cutting edge, the cutting-in and cutting-out process is relatively stable. Experiments have proved that compared with the flat-blade ball end mill, when milling with an S-shaped ball end mill, not only the three cutting components are relatively small, but also the three components fluctuate during the cutting-in and cutting-out process. The scope is relatively small;

(4) The blade inclination angle of each point on the S blade is different. Due to the blade inclination angle, the chips can be smoothly discharged along the outer edge of the cutting-edge direction, which can effectively prevent the chips from sticking to the blade and avoid damage to the blade.

With the popularity of CNC machine tools in my country’s manufacturing industry, the demand for ball end mills is increasing, and its production has broad market prospects. For more discussion, please contact Melody at UKO!