A Demonstrator’s Guide to Body Armor : Protecting Yourself against Blows,

Cutting tool material consisting of polycrystalline cubic boron nitride with a metallic or ceramic binder. PCBN is available either as a tip brazed to a carbide insert carrier or as a solid insert. Primarily used for cutting hardened ferrous alloys.

Metal-removing edge on the face of a cutter that travels in a plane perpendicular to the axis. It is the edge that sweeps the machined surface. The flat should be as wide as the feed per revolution of the cutter. This allows any given insert to wipe the entire workpiece surface and impart a fine surface finish at a high feed rate.

To eliminate the difficulties of hard turning operations, Seco Tools has added a new grade format and several new geometries to its already expansive line of PCBN inserts. These additions broaden the extremely tough Seco CH3515 insert grade and introduce a new solid CBN150 insert grade, special long and short wiper geometries and laser-etched chipbreakers.

Groove or other tool geometry that breaks chips into small fragments as they come off the workpiece. Designed to prevent chips from becoming so long that they are difficult to control, catch in turning parts and cause safety problems.

Workpiece is held in a chuck, mounted on a face plate or secured between centers and rotated while a cutting tool, normally a single-point tool, is fed into it along its periphery or across its end or face. Takes the form of straight turning (cutting along the periphery of the workpiece); taper turning (creating a taper); step turning (turning different-size diameters on the same work); chamfering (beveling an edge or shoulder); facing (cutting on an end); turning threads (usually external but can be internal); roughing (high-volume metal removal); and finishing (final light cuts). Performed on lathes, turning centers, chucking machines, automatic screw machines and similar machines.

The Seco CH3515 insert grade offers high reliability in harsh cutting conditions with heavy interrupted cuts, while the CBN150 solid insert grade yields high surface-finish quality during light interrupted and continuous cuts in hard turning. The complete standard line now includes a broader range of sizes and geometries to optimize all hard-turning operations, and cost per edge drops with an increased number of cutting edges per insert.

With new laser-etched chipbreakers, the inserts are extremely well suited for applications that transition from hard to soft part surfaces while allowing for increased depths of cut and feed rates over previous insert designs. The laser-generated flowing-radii chipbreakers exceed the performance of ground chipbreakers in generating smooth insert walls and reducing sharp corners. These improvements produce smoother chip flow and help prevent chipping while increasing chipbreaker application range.

Enhanced hard turning feed rates and/or surface finish quality result from new long WL and short WS wiper radii. The WL wiper inserts enable feed-rate increases of up to 100 percent while maintaining surface finish quality. With the WS wiper, cutting forces drop by as much as 15 percent for improved machining in low-stability conditions.