Tell it the job, it tells you the tool and the numbers

21 September 2026. Somebody rings a tooling supplier with a job rather than a part number. A sixteen millimetre slot in alloy steel, forty five millimetres deep, on a machining centre. The answer is a tool, a grade, a coating and four numbers, and it takes an applications engineer who knows which table to open and what the tables do not cover. That conversation is now a form anybody can fill in.

The part is on the screen while you answer

• It starts as the stock you are cutting from: a block, a plate, a round bar, a tube or a casting, drawn to the sizes you type, and it changes as you type them.
• Choose the material and the part takes that surface. The same surfaces the design modules use, so a bar of stainless looks like the bar of stainless it looked like there.
• Choose the machine and the part turns to face it. A lathe lays the bar along the spindle and brings the jaws in, a mill sets the block on the table, a drilling machine stands the work under the spindle.
• Then the tool arrives, cutting where it will actually cut. The endmill sections are the measured ones from the design module, the insert sits in its holder at its lead angle, the drill has its point angle on it, and the path drawn through the part is the cut you described rather than a decoration: the slot at its depth, the pocket at its stepover, the roughing passes down the bar, the hole to its depth with its peck.
• When the form is done the part is shown machined, with the metal that came off taken off it.

Every number is read from a table, and the table is named

• Sixteen work materials carry their ISO 513 application group, their machinability band and their Kienzle constants, and the cutting data comes from the published manufacturer tables for that band rather than from a curve fitted to them.
• Milling reads a carbide table or an HSS table by the substrate you chose, and the feed is clamped to the diameter span the table actually publishes instead of being extrapolated past its last row. Turning reads its own table by operation and band. Drilling reads its published speeds and its published feed per diameter.
• Where the physics is standard it is applied and cited: the specific cutting force from Kienzle for the cutting force and the power at the cut, the radial chip thinning factor when the stepover is under half the diameter, the effective diameter at depth on a ball nose, Taylor for what a speed change does to tool life.
• The finish you ask for is met from a published surface finish chart, forty eight cells of it, read the other way round to give the feed that reaches it. A finish no published cell covers is stated as not covered.
• Insert designations are decoded to ISO 1832 and the inscribed circle comes from the published size table for that shape rather than arithmetic on the size code, which is off by nearly a millimetre on a common size.
• Coatings are chosen from the publisher's own workpiece list, including what a coating is published as unsuitable for. Aluminium never gets an aluminium oxide coating here because no publisher recommends one.

It answers with what you hold

• The specification is matched against your catalogue across the cutting tool, round tool and indexable schemas at once, and the match is scored on the things that decide the job: diameter, flute count, corner radius and coating on a solid tool, shape, size, grade and chipbreaker on an insert, and the ISO group the maker published it for.
• A holder is matched to the insert rather than scored as though it were one, and it is listed under the insert it takes.
• There is always an answer. When nothing you hold fits, the specification hands straight into the endmill design module to be ground to order, with the diameter, the flute count, the corner radius, the length of cut and the coating already filled in.
• When your range holds nothing of that kind at all, it says so plainly and names the kind it wanted rather than offering the nearest thing of the wrong sort.

What it will not do

• It will not invent a figure. A material outside the published bands, a finish off the chart, an interrupted cut in a group nobody publishes a penalty for: each is stated as missing with the question that would resolve it, not filled with a plausible number.
• It has no machine in it unless you put one there. Tell it the spindle power, the torque and the maximum speed and the cut is checked against them and cut back if it has to be, with the reason on the screen. Leave them out and the cut is quoted and the check is skipped.
• It is a starting recommendation. Every figure is tuned at the machine, and the sources note on the results says the date the tables were read.
• Grinding, broaching and gear cutting are not in it. Turning, milling, drilling, boring, reaming, grooving, parting, threading and the tapping drill are.