The CNC Tool You've Never Seen Before!

This tool is an absolute game changer. This tool saved me literally hundreds of hours of machine time. So this is a lens end mill. It belongs to a family of end mills called circle segment cutters that are great for surfacing and reducing cycle times. So the first eight years of my career I worked at Schilling Robotics. They were also Titan's biggest customer when he was just starting out. So 70% of our mill cycle times at Schilling was surfacing. When I left there to become a programmer at Sac EDM, we got this job and it was going to have hundreds of hours of surfacing. So that's what led me to start researching ways to cut down on that cycle time. I came across circle segment cutters and it was exactly what I needed. So what separates this lens end mill from a standard ball end mill is this huge radius across the nose. This is a three quarter inch tool, but the nose radius is the equivalent of a three inch ball end mill. So what that allows you to do is to take way bigger step overs and decrease your cycle time while maintaining that great surface finish. So to prove this, I ran a part out of 6061 aluminum that I used to run at Sac EDM for an aerospace company. I used a standard three quarter inch ball end mill and it took almost three hours. Now I'm going to run this lens end mill on the same part with bigger step overs and we're going to see how much cycle time we can knock off while getting a better surface finish. With that being said, let's get to machining. So before we get to use the lens end mill, I'm going to walk you through the entire machining process of a part I used to make at Sac EDM. This is the part that led me to first using a lens end mill. The ball end mill we were using was just taking hours to finish. I'm going to walk you through op one machining, then fixture machining, then we're going to bolt our part to our fixture, and then it's on to op two where we get to use our lens end mill. For op one, we need to face the part, profile it, put some pockets in, add a bunch of M6x1 threads, and then chamfer everything. I programmed this part in SolidCAM and I was really impressed to see that SolidCAM already had lens end mills in their library. A lot of CAM softwares don't have these lens end mills built in and it makes programming them a lot more difficult. All right, so that's it for op one machining. Now we got to get these vices out and get our fixture onto our Schunk Bureau S quick change pallet system. On op two of the fixture, the main thing we're doing is adding two bosses that are going to locate our part by pinning off from our existing M6x1 threads. I wanted to take a moment to shout out Siemens. Before I started here, I wasn't familiar with their control, but I picked it up really quick and it just goes to show how user-friendly the Siemens control really is. All right, guys, we got our op two fixture machined. Now we got to bolt it to our part, pop it back on our Schunk Bureau S quick change pallets, and we'll be good to go for op two. All right, got it bolted down, back in the machine. All right, time to get on to op two machining. So for our final machining operation, we're going to rough out our part and then finally it's time to call up our lens end mill. Now we get to showcase just how much of a beast this tool really is. All right, guys, op two finished machining. The part looks really good. It looks like our lens tool gave us a great surface finish, but we won't know for sure until we take it to Travis and have him throw it on the profilometer. Let's do it. So we're going to check the standard ball end mill first. All right, now it's time to check the lens end mill finish. Wow, that's the best finish I've ever got. All right, guys, so as you can see, we got a way better finish. With the ball end mill, I took a 10,000 step over and had to use a slower feed rate to get the finish to this level. It took almost three hours to machine this part. With the lens end mill, I took a 20,000 step over and it only took 50 minutes to machine. So it's obvious the lens end mill is just a way better finishing tool when you've got the right feature to machine. My name's Dre. This was actually my first video and I hope you guys liked it. Let me know down in the comments. Like the video, subscribe to our channel, and I'll catch you guys on the next one.