End milling of austenitic stainless steel

Stainless steel is widely used as a, popular material not only in many industries but also in the production for daily necessaries. And besides, it is also known well as one of the difficult-to-cut material. In this paper, two kinds of austenitic stainless steels, SUS 304 and SUS 316, were milled using coated carbide end mill and non-coated carbide end mill by side cutting method. Cutting force, AE signal obtained during end milling and tool failure were investigated to examine the effect of coating and the machinability of the stainless steels. Coated carbide end mill shows superior cutting performance. Austenitic stainless steel SUS 304 shows a poor machinability compared with SUS 316 and carbon steel S50C.