Machining Aluminum

V8 Engine Block Machining From Solid Aluminum

Aluminum is Inexpensive, Lightweight and is Formable at Cold Temperatures

Aluminum is one of the most common materials used in manufacturing strong, lightweight parts. PMF manufactures parts made purely of Aluminum alloys as well as parts made from two or more materials such as Stainless Steel and Aluminum.

Common Forms of Aluminum (in various tempers)
6000's, 5000's, 1000's, 2000's, 3000's, 7000's

Benefits of Aluminum

• Inexpensive
• Lightweight
• Formable at cold temperatures

Considerations of Aluminum

• Softness can lead to tearing
• Low tensile strength (approx. 1/3 that of steel)

Applications of Aluminum

• Military munitions
• Aerospace
• Microelectronics
• Automobile parts
• Many others

Looking for inserts for machining aluminum? Find them at pgsTools.com. Your choice

PCD Inserts for Aluminum

Carbide Inserts for Aluminum

PCD Tipped Carbide Boring Bars

PCD Tipped Carbide Boring Bars

PCD Tipped Brazed Boring Tool. For Bore sizes smaller than 8 mm in diameter. PCD is brazed directly to a tungsten carbide shank providing a rigid boring tool capable of remarkable surface finishies and providing a high productive alternative to internal grinding.

For Bore sizes smaller than 8 mm in diameter, it is not possible to use PCD tipped cutting tool inserts. In order to put a PCD tip into the carbide insert, material must be removed. This makes the insert weak and prone to breakage when it is clamped into the boring bar.

At the same time, clamping of small inserts into small boring bars becomes progressively more difficult as the bore size reduces.Top clamps trap swarf and, in order to fit inside the bore, become too small to exert enough clamping pressure. Screw locked inserts, while leaving space for swarf, require sufficient material under the insert for the thread of the clamping screw.

These problems are overcome by using brazed tools. The PCD tip is brazed directly to a tungsten carbide shank providing a rigid boring tool capable of remarkable surface finishes and providing a highly productive alternative to internal grinding.

PCD Insert Tooling for Plastics

Plastics and reinforced plastics can be machined with PCD Inserts and PCD tooling.

The general perception is that plastic materials are easy to machine. However, soft plastics are not always so stable, and the machining process, which always generates heat, can affect dimensional and material properties like surface texture and colour, if the correct cutting tool is not applied.

PCD tools are particulary effective on abrasive plastics where plastics are reinforced with carbon fibres (CF) or glass fibres (GF).

For more information on machining plastics with PCD insert or PCD tooling please contact the experts at:

David Richards Engineering Limited

Or

David Richards Engineering Corporation

PCD Insert Machining Dont's #1

PCD inserts are not recommended for the machining of Iron, Cobalt, or Nickel alloys. In the presence of these metals and the heat and pressure created by cutting, diamond is encouraged to revert to the metastable carbon form: graphite. It is possible to use PCD inserts to machine some stainless steels and other highly alloyed materials, which have the iron, cobalt or nickel tied up in a non-reactive state. Even so, these materials should be machined at low cutting speeds and feeds with coolant to reduce any heat generated.

What is PCD (Polycrystalline Diamond)?

Turning Carbon Fiber Composites

What's the best insert for turning carbon fiber composites?

At first it might seem that machining fiber-filled composites with hard cutting tools would be a recipe for disaster. Developers of cutting methods and tools for composites face all kinds of problems. A composite's fiber layers can delaminate from the machined surface; the fibers or other hard reinforcements are abrasive and reduce tool life considerably; and the combination of hard and soft materials that make up a composite complicates the best choice of tool and machining parameters.

What do I use then?

Diamond will interact with carbon in ferrous materials, so its use is largely restricted to nonferrous workpieces. Today, the automotive industry is the major user of diamond tools in machining components made of aluminum-silicon alloys--in particular the 300 series of aluminum alloys. Major applications for silicon-containing aluminum materials are in pistons, engine heads, blocks and manifolds, wheels, and transmission parts. Other significant applications for diamond tools are in machining graphite, carbon-carbon (C-C) composites, metal-matrix composites (MMC), and fiber reinforced plastics (FRPs).


Where do I find the tools?

PCD Inserts
Diamond Coated Inserts

What about speeds and feeds?

Speeds and feeds for machining composites with pcd

special thanks to SME for information on machining composites

Using PCD and its APPLICATIONS

Machining Non Ferrous Metals and Alloys including Metal Matrix Composites.

Machining Plastics, Rubber, Fibre, Reinforced Plastics and CompositeS

Machining Chipboard, MDF and Natural Woods

Wear Pads, Gauging Points and Probes

PCD can offer dramatic improvements in both efficiency and product quality, but the following points should be considered:-

If conventional tools fail prematurely due to breakage, DR-PCD tools are unlikely to fair any better. If excessive vibration, inclusions in component material, or similar problems cannot be avoided, then it may be preferable to continue breaking relatively cheap conventional tools.

However, the benefits offered by DR-PCD tools can often provide the incentive to overcome these problems. DR-PCD tools may give a tool life improvement of 100 times, paying back any extra costs in improving the machinability of the material, improving the work holding or optimizing the cutting tool geometries.

Although DR-PCD is both tough and extremely hard, the cutting edges can be extremely fragile. Care must be taken to avoid chipping the cutting edges.

It should be remembered that diamond and graphite are two forms of the same element, Carbon. When diamond is produced synthetically from graphite, a catalyst is used to reduce the reaction time to a commercially acceptable level. Suitable catalysts are iron, nickel or cobalt.

Unfortunately, these elements also catalyze the transformation of diamond into graphite. Diamond is not therefore generally effective for machining ferrous, cobalt or nickel based materials.

WHAT IS PCD (POLYCRYSTALLINE DIAMOND)

Diamond is the hardest, most abrasive-resistant, material known to man. These properties make diamond an ideal cutting tool. Within the crystal structure, however, fracture planes, used by the diamond cutter to produce the gem diamond from the rough, can cause catastrophic breakage of the tool edge, when subjected to impact.

DR-PCD tools incorporate Polycrystalline Diamond blanks produced under conditions of high pressure (1 million PSI) and temperature (1700 Degrees C), similar to those of diamond synthesis. Randomly orientated, carefully selected synthetic diamond crystals are grown together on a hard metal substrate. This results in a material with the hardness, abrasive resistance and high thermal conductivity of diamond with the toughness of hard metal.

Using the hard metal substrate the PCD blank is brazed to a carrier, either steel or hard metal, and machined by grinding or E.D.M to produce the cutting edge.

When compared to other cutting tool materials, there are three main reasons for using DR-PCD tools:-

Increased tool life results in reduced tool cost per component and less idle machine time.

Increasing cutting speed improves productivity through reduced cycle times.

Grinding and other less productive machining methods can be replaced by DR-PCD milling and turning.

For more information on PCD Inserts please visit:

David Richards Engineering

Machining Ceramic with PCD Inserts

The light weight of ceramic materials and their outstanding resistance to wear and high
temperatures make them increasingly preferred for industrial applications. However, machining
ceramics is very costly and time consuming.

Grinding, with its high cost and low volume material removal rate (MRR), is still the most common method used to finish machine sintered (fired) ceramic components.

New machining methods must be evaluated in order to produce ceramic components in a more timely, cost-effective manner.

Therefore to minimize the time and cost associated with finish machining after sintering, ceramic materials should be machined in the bisque state with PCD tooling whenever possible.

Expected Benefits
- Reduced operation time by 90% by rough machining in bisque state, when compared to grinding
- Reduced labor costs
- Increased competitiveness of ceramic components

David Richards Engineering specializes in the manufacture of PCD Inserts and cutting tools. They offer extensive experience in the machining of carbide with PCD tools. Contact them via sales@drengus.com for information regarding speeds and feeds and recommended tooling.

Carbide Insert Grade Comparison Chart

www.pgstools.com has just listed a carbide insert grade comparison chart to help compare the different grades across the following manufacturers:

Kennametal, Sandvik, Carboloy Seco, Korloy, Sumitomo, Kyocera, Iscar, Toshiba Tungaloy, Mitsubishi, Valenite, and Taegutec.

Find the chart here:

carbide insert grade comparison chart

Milling with PCD from David Richards Engineering

Milling with PCD from David Richards Engineering

Fixed Pocket Cutters and Precision PCD Inserts

PCD (Polycrystalline Diamond) has been available for miling non-ferrous abrasive materials for many years. The common method of tool production has been grinding using Diamond Grinding Wheels. the forces required to grind PCD with Diamond are extremely high. this means that it has been very difficult to product cutting tool inserts accurately enough to work properly in the fixed pocket milling cutters commonly available.

Cutters with adjustable pockets for the inserts were developed, but these require care and patience to set up and are expensive to buy and repair.

Using the latest wire erosion technology David Richards Engineering have developed techniques which produce PCD tipped cutting tool inserts that are as accurate as Precision Ground Carbide.
Installed in the best quality Diamite cutter bodies, Diamite PCD Inserts provide all the Tool Life and quality advantages of PCD with the convenience of Carbide.

Tools available:

Face Milling Cutters
End Milling Cutters
APKT PCD Inserts

For more information please contact:

David Richards Engineering Limited by drengineering@aol.com or www.dreng.co.uk