Table of Contents

Cutter Adjustment Levers for Force Reduction

When force peaks push close to or beyond tool limits, three cutter-side levers reduce peaks without changing the NC or the toolpath.

Shorten Tool Overhang

The unsupported tool length above the cut multiplies bending stress. A common installation leaves 15 mm or more above the flute start; reducing this exposure toward ~5 mm typically produces a large drop in the yield-stress ratio for the same NC.

Process documents may fix the overhang for procedural reasons. If the engineering envelope allows, shortening the overhang is the cheapest mitigation before tuning anything else.

Adjust Core Radius

Heavy-cut cutters narrow the chip-evacuation flute to thicken the cutter core, raising bending strength. The exact core radius cannot be measured externally; it is an empirical input.

The HiNC default is 0.6 (cutter-core radius as a fraction of cutter radius) for 4-flute end mills. If the cutter routinely tolerates yield-stress ratios around 200 % without breakage, the actual core is thicker than the default — raise the value in steps (e.g., 0.7) until the simulated ratio aligns with the observed safety margin.

Upgrade Cutter Material

The default WC-Co6-800nm is a low-cost grade. Finer-grain or coated grades have higher yielding stress and better thermal tolerance:

  • WC-Co6-TiC-400nm — finer grain with TiC. A reasonable upgrade when the cutter quality is unknown but suspected better than the baseline.

For a known cutter, configure the matching material file under Resource/CutterMaterial/ rather than guessing the grade.

See Also