Speeds and Feeds

If you are one of those old time machinist's you can remember the type of tooling we used back in the old days and fast you could run with them. The older tooling, particularly high speed steel and carbide tooling had to be run at slower feeds and speeds than today's technologically advanced insertable tooling. High speed tooling for the lathes is basically a blank piece of steel that measured in different sizes like 1 inch by 1 inch square or so on. You took that piece of steel or carbide and hand ground the shape you desired on the tool. When running this type of tooling in the manual machines you could only run it so fast as to keep the tool sharp and not have to continually take it out of the machine and resharpen it. That is the advantage indexable inserts have in today's machining world. If an edge of an insert gets dull you simply rotate the insert . There are basically hundreds of designs of inserts that anyone can choose from today. From cutting soft steels to hard steels. Aluminum or stainless. In today's cnc world you can push the feeds and speeds of these indexable inserts up to ten times faster than the way us old timers did back in the stone ages.