For the production of homokinetic joints of hardened steel, numerous automotive manufacturers and suppliers rely on ballnose milling cutters from the MAPAL CPMill program. For years, these have been successfully used for premachining (soft milling) and finishing (hard milling with PCBN tools). They are subject to continuous improvement. A new, comprehensive development of the milling cutter for premachining now allows users to enjoy a significant increase in efficiency.

The new, highly spiraled geometry ensures optimal chip removal, according to the company. Instead of four cutting edges, the new solid-carbide ballnose milling cutter has five. Furthermore, in addition to the base substrate, the coating has been improved. For easy changing of the milling heads, they are equipped with the CFS interface. Through the precise tuning of the taper and face, a high concentricity of ≤5μm, excellent rigidity and consistently high quality are achieved.

Examples in practice show that with the new CPMill ballnose milling cutter, machining time per component can be significantly reduced. While 75,000 parts were previously machined in one week, for example, there is around 12 percent more produced (namely, 85,000 components) with the five-edged cutter using the same machine capacity and without any additional investment in equipment, because the tool can cut at higher machining parameters. In addition, the milling cutter has a 25 percent higher service life than the previous model.