New indexable face mill

The largest (biggest diameter) cutter I have apart from my large hogging cutters is 12mm, so if I need to face off a decent sized piece of stock before machining, it won't look pretty. Ideally I'd have a proper face mill of 50mm diameter or more so the job can be done in just a few passes. 

I've got a couple of Indian (Chronos brand) zero (or possibly negative) rake indexable milling cutters I bought some years ago before I knew anything about indexable tools. I realise now that these are pretty much exactly what you DON'T want to use in a home workshop with lightweight machine tools. They look remarkably similar to these, perhaps not surprisingly, seeing as that's where I bought them.

 I suspect they were originally designed when inserts were first being developed and their geometries were fairly crude - they have no chipbreaker and just a basic, flat-topped triangular shape. Nowadays even triangular inserts have decent top rake angles (12-15 degrees is common) and a massive range of fancy chipbreakers, materials and surface finishes. These make the cutting process much easier, resulting in a lower force / power / rigidity requirement and a better surface finish. Even with a large rigid machine, they are a much better choice.

In particular, there are inserts and tools designed specifically for milling operations including facing and side cutting. If you look at the big boys such as Korloy, Mitsubishi, Iscar etc, they are supplying a range of such cutters and inserts. In an ideal world I'd be stinking rich and would simply be able to order up what I fancied without needing to worry about the cost. It's not an ideal world though, so I have to be careful about how much I blow on tools.

My Mitsubishi BP300 indexable tool uses the AP**1135 style inserts (11mm cutting edge), so there may be advantages to using the same inserts on the face mill. However, once you get to the 50mm size diameter holders and above, the specified inserts are the larger AP**1604 inserts (16mm edge). 

For my purposes, a reckoned a 50mm or ideally 63mm tool would be good tradeoff between having a large-ish diameter tool for facing and a smallish diameter tool for outside roughing and finishing. Something like the Korloy AMCM-3050HS (see page E70) which is 50mm with 5 inserts. I agonised over the price of the thing if bought new. Even with a discount, the bottom line would come to around £200 by the time you actually provide the thing with an arbor and add in the VAT. And that's without any inserts.

Ebay finally came to the rescue. All that surfing and finger discipline paid off finally. One new, unused example came up for £100 delivered and I offered £70. Offer accepted and a genuine unused tool arrived a few days later. 

The inserts for these are between £4 (Cutwel) and £6 (APT-tools), which means another £40-60 per box of 10. However, ebay comes to the rescue again in the form of genuine(!) Mitsubishi inserts at £1 each including postage from China. They use a lot of them out in China and I guess they must be pretty cheap there. So I bought 20 each of the steel and aluminium cutting versions. Bargain buckets. They even came with a bonus set of 6 Torx screws.

And I relented and bought a face mill arbor from Cutwel for £20. They stock a wide range of ISO40 holders and their prices are about the best I've seen, even including ebay. You can also be confident that they are reasonable quality.

Here's the final assembly. I look forward to trying it out: