Here’s a true story for you. A Tier One supplier was fulfilling a defense contract for titanium components using conventional 40 taper vertical machining centers. The part had a simple turning operation and then was put into the VMC and machined to its final stage. Total cycle time: 5.5 hours.

Enter Mike Littlejohn, Senior Applications Specialist for GWS. Long story short – supplier reduces cycle time to 29 minutes and drops one whole setup. Owner’s jaw drops. He turns to the GM and says, “We’ve been doing this wrong the whole time!”

Just Another Day on the Shop Floor

These are the sort of things GWS specialists, like Mike, do every day. With their background in process analysis and cycle time reduction, they have the ability to re-approach a particular manufacturing process and achieve great results through the use of our custom tooling. When running production quantities, even a quarter of a second cycle time savings on a part could save hours annually and dramatically affect your bottom line. The experience and expertise of our specialists have led customers to hours and hours of cycle time reduction.

The Trouble with Titanium

Titanium is used extensively in the aerospace and medical segments. The problem is it has a tendency to generate excessive heat at the contact area during the machining process. With titanium’s low thermal conductivity characteristics, that heat gets transferred mainly to the cutting tool. This results in long continuous chips that can weld on to the tool edge, giving you a poor finish, or worse yet, out of tolerance parts. And you can just imagine what that kind of heat does to tool life. Feeds and speeds need to be dialed in carefully in order to get any decent tool life at all. All of these characteristics must be taken into account if you want to mill titanium successfully.

Hold Up on Desperate Measures

To solve titanium issues, aerospace companies might be ready to invest in new machinery that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here’s a tip. Consult with one of our specialists on the appropriate tooling on your current machine before breaking the budget for new capital assets.

To serve industries where titanium and other alloys are widely used, GWS has developed a standard cutting tool line that was created with these materials in mind. The PYSTL series comes in different multiple flute variations and coatings. Even more styles are currently in development.

Tailor-Made for Your Application

When you need more than standard tooling, GWS can develop a custom design from a part print or reverse engineer a tool from a part sample. We can design a custom tool that potentially can machine more than one feature at a time.

To us, building a custom tool is like putting together a new recipe. In addition to geometry, we research combinations of substrates and coatings. Because we specialize in custom tools, our specialists have this process down cold. That’s why we’re known for our fast turnarounds for tailor-made products.

If titanium and other space-aged alloys are giving your operators fits and causing a dip in your bottom line, contact us and see if a standard or custom cutting tool from GWS will help give your jaw-dropping results.