Freesteel Blog » As hard as steel

As hard as steel

Monday, April 10th, 2006 at 11:04 am Written by:

A reader asked about the hardness of steel we can knowingly cut with our Adaptive clearing method. He asked:

“Got the general gist of the method, hard steel I read, P20 should I presume?”

We have some reliable data, produced by the machine tool manufacturer OPS Ingersoll, and demonstrated on Euromold in December 2005 and other trade shows. The image shows one of the samples they cut live on the show. (It was a good set up, we could talk to people and if they were sufficiently interested we could take them to OPS Ingersoll’s stand to show ‘Adaptive Clearing’ in use):

  • Cutter: Toroidal 10 x 0.5 mm
  • Spindle speed: 8000 min-1
  • Feedrate: 8000 mm/min
  • Z step: 10mm
  • Side step: 0.6mm
  • Material: 1.276 7HRC54

HRC54 stands for Rockwell hardness 54, which is high in the scale of hardness.

Whilst trying to find out what exactly P20 stands for I found this interesting article. So, it seems that P20 means different things in different parts of the world. But is P20 a standardised way of describing toolmaking steel, how does it compare to HRC (Rockwell hardness) which is a standardised way of measuring steel hardness, I don’t know. If you do, please leave a comment!

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