About Chamfering with Ball/Bull End Mills

Inventor HSM supports chamfering with ball end mills and bull end mills. This may be useful in cases where you are already using a ball or bull end mill in a part and wish to chamfer off sharp edges, but save a tool change to an ordinary chamfering tool. With small chamfer sizes, the differences between a flat chamfer using a chamfering tool and a slightly rounded chamfer may be negligible.

To create the chamfer, simply create a 2D Contour operation and make sure that a ball/bull end mill tool is selected.



Chamfer parameters for a ball mill tool

In the following part, the spherical indent is created using a ball end mill, and afterwards the 90 degree edges are chamfered using the same tool.



Example using a ball end mill for chamfering