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Milling services

Milling at Midwest Metal Fabrication.

Milling is the process of cutting away material by feeding a workpiece past a rotating multiple tooth cutter. The cutting action of the many teeth around the milling cutter provides a fast method of machining. The machined surface may be flat, angular, or curved. The surface may also be milled to any combination of shapes. The machine for holding the workpiece, rotating the cutter, and feeding it is known as the Milling machine. Milling is as fundamental as drilling among powered metal cutting processes.

• Milling overview
• Milling process characteristics
• Materials
• Workpiece geometry/shapes
• Workholding methods
• Tool style
• Tool materials
• Part size
• Tolerances
• Complementary services

The milling process is versatile for a basic machining method, but because the milling set up has so many degrees of freedom, milling is usually less accurate than the turning or grinding processes unless we implement especially rigid fixturing.

Milling overview

At Midwest Metal Fabrication we utilize milling operations for manual machining to fabricate parts or components required by our customers that are axially symmetric.

We operate:

• Manual light-duty Bridgeports™
• Vertical and horizontal CNC machining centers

for milling parts up to 30’ long.

Milling process characteristics

The milling process:

• Uses a rotating cutter to produce a machined surface and creates small, discontinuous chips.
• Uses vertical and horizontal milling machines.
• Removes materials with the face and/or periphery of the cutter,
• Uses a wide variety of tools, including square end mills, ball end mills, shell end mills, and T-slot mills, and
• Produces slots, angles, pockets, radii, and many other workpiece geometries.

Materials

Midwest Metal Fabrication operators mill various types of materials including brass, cast iron, mild steel, stainless steel, and aluminum.

Workpiece geometry/shapes

Midwest Metal Fabrication can mill plain, face, taper, contour, and radius/fillet shapes.

The surface finish that we can provide will depend on the material and the properties of the material turned, the cutting speed, the feed rate, and the tool nose radius.

Workholding methods

We use both vises and strap clamps as workholding devices depending on the actual material and milling dimensioning required.

Tool style

Midwest Metal Fabrication offers a great variety in tool styles for our milling operations. Common tool styles available include:

• Square end mill
• Face mill
• T-slot mill
• Dovetail mill

We use the square end mill for milling cavities, squares, slots, and profiles, the face mill for milling flat surfaces, the T-slot mill and dovetail mills for milling shaped slots in our customers’ fabricated part or component.

Tool materials

Midwest Metal Fabrication uses a variety of different tool materials during our milling operations. These include:

• High speed steels,
• Carbides,
• Ceramics, and
• Diamonds.

We use high speed steels for special tool shapes and low production items, carbide inserts for parts or components that require high speed or high production milling, ceramic inserts for high speed or high production milling plus uninterrupted cuts, and diamond inserts for parts or components that require high surface qualities, fine tolerances, or nonferrous or nonmetallic materials. We select tool materials based on the customers’ part or component specifications.

Part size

Midwest Metal Fabrication milling operators are capable of milling fabricated parts from 2” W x 2” H x 10’ L to 6’ W x 15’ H x 30’ L.

Tolerances

Our milling machines can maintain a tolerance of +/- 0.005” for our production work.

Complementary services

Midwest Metal Fabrication offers drilling, tapping, turning, and grooving among other complementary machining services for our custom fabricated metal parts or components to complement our milling and other machining processes.

Call us today at 1-219-931-3131, email us at sales@midwestmetalfabrication.com, or send a fax using 1-219-844-8512 to get a quick quote to help solve your heavy gauge steel fabricating problems.

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