Resources efficiency in milling of dies and molds with various hard coating materials and modified machine dynamics

The complexity of highly loaded molds and dies with increased demands for lifetime and resources efficiency combined with requirements for higher performance, improved economy and better ecological behaviour makes it necessary to use new hard coating technologies. A complete or a partial hard layer coating of a component offers huge economic potentials, but requires an additional finish milling process. The investigations refer to milling of Plasma Transfer Arc (PTA)-welded Cobalt alloys (Stellite) and HVOF WC carbide layers. The results showed that it is possible to machine Stellite- and WC-layers using CBN and PCD respectively, depending on the machining parameters. Further developments of machine tool aimed to improve machine dynamics mainly for large dies and molds are presented in the paper.