On the cutting of wood for joinery applications

In the joinery sector, several tons of wood are processed every month. Exploitation costs must be kept low for achieving reasonable margins. Therefore, tool life is an important issue to study, looking for ways of making it longer. There are different types of wood involved in this application, and a value to establish the difficulty of machining one or the other is interesting. For this purpose, the concept of specific cutting force is introduced in this work. In the work presented here, three issues are regarded: (a) three typical woods are characterized by means of the specific cutting force as it is commonly done in the metal industry, (b) coatings are tested for high-speed steel and cemented carbide tools, and (c) tool performance is defined by admissible values of flank wear. The field tests performed showed that the coating of tools could be a good choice for this application.