Carbide insert cutting aluminum magnified- GIF

[Altair]

Carbide insert cutting aluminum.




Previously:

Drilling lead under a scanning electron microscope - GIF
Steel cutting magnified - GIF
Cast iron microstructure magnified - GIF
Paper edge under electron microscope - photo
Chalk magnified - photo

[hemmjo]

Looks like a dozer peeling up a layer of clay.

[mtsmith14]

I wonder what the depth of cut is? Lots of deflection in the tool.

[Frank S]

Gone are the days when your only choices were HSS or brazed carbide tooling for turning aluminum. Along with the advent of CNC machining came many advances in indexable inserts. So much so that you can make yourself crazy or at least less mentally stable when trying to choose the correct insert for the material you are processing. Do you need hard or softer inserts if doing steel then harder like C6 or for super fine finishes try C8 if cast then C1 through C4 usually C2 is a good happy medium. Do you need press formed or ground again for most applications Pressed is the logical choice but there are as many different edge profiles as the woke society has gender counts sorry, I didn't really say that did I LOL
For aluminum or stainless I usually just grab a used insert and grind a sharp edge to it doing away with the pressed edge radius rather than buying special ground ones for those metals