Tool life doubled in deep hole boring

Machined component manufacturer Millhouses Engineering has been using Garia for twelve months and has seen a vast improvement in cutting fluid performance since the first day

Millhouses Engineering produces first stage and semi-finished machined components, primarily for the oil and petro-chemical industries.

The company has a number of strategic business units at their 50,000 sq.

feet premises just off the M1 at Rotherham, which include CNC machining, deep hole boring and milling.

Its busy machine shop houses equipment for CNC turning/boring/ horizontal boring and deep hole boring; and a range of manual machines such as combination turret lathes, milling machines, lathes and saws.

Due to the nature of deep hole boring the machine operator cannot see how the tooling is performing or check on tip wear.

The cutting oil is therefore one of the most critical factors in the deep hole boring process.

Millhouses, who are always looking for improvements in efficiency and performance, were conducting tooling trials to improve feed and surface speed, but found that the neat cutting oil they were using was not allowing them to exploit the performance improvements that tooling company said were possible.

Tool life and surface finish were very poor with the coolant being used and Millhouses reached a point where wearability and durability were unacceptable with the speeds and feeds now being achieved.

BTA Unitac, the tooling company conducting the trials, advised that a coolant change was necessary to optimise the performance of the cutting tools and suggested that Millhouses contact Shell with a recommendation to change the coolant to a Garia grade.

David Stevenson of Shell UK recommended Garia 403 F-10, a low viscosity oil specially formulated for hard materials and ideal for high speed metal cutting and for boring, trepanning and counterboring operations employing the BTA process.

Millhouses has now been using Garia for twelve months and has seen a vast improvement in cutting fluid performance since the first day.

The company estimates that tool life has doubled and says Garia has given them the confidence to bore tighter tolerance work that they would previously have thought impossible.

Shell Garia's performance has been equally impressive across all the company 's boring operations, working with a variety of materials from mild steels through matensitic and austinetic stainless steels and including nickel based super alloys.

And thanks to the deep hole boring trials and the partnerships with BTA Unitac and Shell UK, Millhouses have been awarded an ongoing contract for a major aircraft component supplier in the UK.

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