A special solid carbide roughing cutter with fully integrated chip breakers developed by LMT Fette for the Airbus plant in Varel, not only enabled axial feed rates on a Dorries Scharmann 5-axis machining centre to be increased by 50 percent to 13.5 mm/rev when machining wrought aluminium alloy, it totally eliminated previous erratic tool performance. In addition, the new tool reduced power draw on the spindle, even when removing material at 3,000 cm~3/min, and provided an in-cut time of 300 minutes before the tool needed changing. The LMT Fette cutter totally solved the problem of swarf 'birds nesting' around the spindle and cutting tool, the original reason LMT's specialist was called in by Volker Dittmar, Airbus' manager of pre-production, to try to provide a solution during the machining of air inlet flanges for the Typhoon aircraft.
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