Ceramic vs carbide inserts, I switched back after 8 months

Ran ceramic inserts on a big production run of hardened steel last year because everyone on here swore they were the future. Got 3x the speed but every single one chipped if my feed varied even a little. Switched back to carbide with a wiper geometry last month and my cycle times only lost 12%, but I have not scrapped a single part since. Am I missing something with ceramics or do they only work in perfect lab conditions?

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willow11424d ago

Did you actually dial in the speeds and feeds for those ceramics or just swap them into the same program you ran with carbide? Ceramics don't bend, they blow up, so yeah a wandering feed will kill them, but the fix is to stop the feed from wandering. Rigid setup, live tooling, no backlash in the screws, and a feed rate that doesn't ride the edge of the insert's happy zone. A lot of guys try ceramics on a machine with slop and then blame the insert when the whole process was never tight enough for them. Your wiper carbide is comfy and it works, cool, but 12% cycle time on a big production run is a real number, and maybe the ceramics got a fair shake everywhere except your setup.

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