Home Machinist's Journal

I believe we've all been in that situation where we have been using some carbide indexable inserts and found that we needed to order more but had no idea what to reorder. The little plastic box that held the inserts very conveniently does not have any identifying marks on it as to what is inside, making it something like a box of Cracker Jack. 

I found myself in that very predicament today and decided to find the information I need and then post it here. 

One of the items I found was a rather long article about the identification of inserts, and it is based on ANSI standards. I copied it to make a PDF of my own, but since it is from a machining website I am very confident that it is copyrighted, thus I cannot share it here. I can however, share the link to the article so that any of you that wishes can copy and paste the article for yourselves if you so choose. That site is:
https://www.ctemag.com/guides/ansi-b2124-indexable-inserts-guide (https://www.ctemag.com/guides/ansi-b2124-indexable-inserts-guide)

In the process of looking I also found a non-copyrighted version of an insert ID chart from Kennemetal and one from Travers Tool.  I will add both of those to our downloads sections and you will see posts about them shortly.