Efficient manufacturing and machining of mold plates

Whether it’s chocolate bars, gummy bears, or shortbread cookies: behind every molded food product lies a mold plate that gives the product its characteristic shape. These molding tools must not only maintain dimensional accuracy and surface precision—they must also meet the food industry’s stringent requirements for robustness, durability, and hygiene. The material of choice is therefore often hardened tool steel, which offers exceptional wear resistance with hardness values around 60 HRC. For machining, this means maximum demands on tool stability, heat dissipation, and process reliability.

When manufacturing mold plates from hardened steel, production teams place high demands on milling cutters and cutting inserts.

Extreme material hardness: With materials exceeding 50–54 HRC, high cutting forces and intense heat generation place extreme stress on the cutting edges, which significantly shortens the service life of conventional tools.

Precise cavity geometries: The mold contours must be machined with millimeter precision – even minor deviations directly affect product quality and fit accuracy on the production line. Complex 3D transitions and tight radii require well-thought-out machining strategies.

Hygienic surfaces: Surfaces in contact with food must be free of scratches, microcracks, or burrs. Deposits in hard-to-reach contours are unacceptable in a production environment – the surface must be clean, smooth, and reproducible.

Cost-effectiveness in series production: Mold plates are often manufactured in large quantities or regularly as replacement tools. Short cycle times and long tool life are therefore not a given, but a business necessity.

Roughing the basic geometry with Slotworx® HP

The Slotworx® HP milling system is specifically designed for high-feed machining and, thanks to a high number of teeth on a very small tool diameter, delivers efficient material removal in the shortest possible time. The optimized interaction between the holder and the insert within the milling head ensures that the tool runs exceptionally smoothly with high process stability.

With a feed rate of 2,000 mm/min and a radial engagement of a_e = 6 mm, material is removed efficiently. The shallow depth of cut specifically reduces cutting forces and protects both the tool and the machine.

Air cooling for clean machining

For this workpiece, cooling is performed with air (external) – a deliberate choice for hard machining: Thermal shock caused by cooling lubricant is avoided, while chips are reliably blown out of the machining zone. The result speaks for itself: Slotworx® HP achieves a tool life of over 80 minutes in this process.

Thanks to the stable roughing process, allowances remain controllable, and subsequent finishing operations can proceed uniformly and reproducibly.

Metric sizes

Imperial sizes

Thanks to Slotworx® HP, hardened steel can be machined with impressive tool life and consistent feed rates. This results in mold plates with the precision and surface finish required by the food industry – reproducible and cost-effective across the entire batch size. 

Whether for wet or dry machining: The Slotworx® HP high-feed milling cutter is suitable for slot, face, copy, and pocket milling. Slotworx® HP is also the system of choice for angled plunging with various strategies as well as for chamfer milling.