The manufacturer has set new standards with the development of this innovative product portfolio for machining non-ferrous materials. In addition to extensive tests in the company’s own research and development department, the performance of the series has been successfully confirmed in wide-ranging field tests. The successful launch of the series is reflected not least by the feedback from truly enthusiastic customers from a wide range of industries, such as the food and automotive industry, as well as the aerospace industry.

The H&V EXN1 series was developed to enable potentially easily machinable materials to be safely processed and to meet the specific requirements of non-ferrous material cutting. In the development of the new expert series, the focus was on increasing the tool life, the surface quality on the produced workpiece and highest process reliability. The milling cutters get a special cutting-edge preparation with a defined edge rounding. This ensures homogeneous cutting edges throughout, even distribution of cutting forces and thus reduced wear. The manufacturing tolerances for radius and concentricity have been optimized to a maximum of 0.003 mm to 0.005 mm and ensure the best possible level of accuracy. The new high-performance geometry with refined grinding pattern and tuned micro cutting edge ensures a sharp cut and excellent chip removal. The milling cutters are completed by using a fine-grain substrate specially designed for machining non-ferrous materials. This interaction results in unique performance. The portfolio includes 35 article groups (645 individual articles), consisting of end mills, roughing mills, finishing mills, trochoidal mills, single flute mills, torus mills, full radius mills and micro milling cutters with diameters ranging from 0.1 mm to 20 mm.

“Production time can be reduced by more than 50 % per component.”

The test phase has shown that it is possible to massively reduce production times by switching to the H&V EXN1 series. With the use of the new Performmaker (endmill), one customer was able to reduce production time per component by more than 50 %. This could be achieved by larger infeeds and higher feeds. Likewise, the use of the new Mirrormaker (finishing cutter) improved the surface quality on the machined parts to a roughness of less than 1 micrometer.
(Previously, the customer used standard aluminium cutters from a competitor with ZrN coating.)

“A coating process that completely eliminates the use of hydrogen.“

In order to optimize the surface quality when using the milling cutters as well as to prevent built-up edges, an innovative coating of tetragonal carbon was also designed. This novel coating process increased the sp3 bonds to over 85 %, reduced the coating thickness to less than one micrometer and lowered the coating hardness to approx. 4500 HV. In addition, the coating is characterized by a very high smoothness, as it forms almost no droplets and ensures a minimal coefficient of friction (approx. 0.05 dry on steel). So almost all non-ferrous materials can be machined quickly and reliably with these milling cutters.