THE EFFECT OF SOME SURFACE TREATMENTS ON THE LIFE OF HIGH-SPEED STEEL TOOLS

Surface treatments are very important, especially for high speed steel cutting tool tips. After the cutting edges have become dull the cutting tip becomes useless. In this paper, three groups of cutting tools were used to turn a mild steel workpiece; the cutting tool groups are conventional high speed steel tools, chromium-hardened tool steels and tufftrided cutting tool steels. A response surface methodology was used to investigate the effect of speed and feed on tool life. Tool life can be increased by these types of surface treatment on high speed steel tools for practical values of the cutting speed.