Milling Burs. Is there a difference between an expensive bur and a cheap one? What is it?

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AKDental

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So i was just wondering if anyone could tell me exactly how a expensive bur is better than a cheaper one in
regards to how they cut and perform. I know that the more expensive ones claim to last longer and cut
"better" but what exactly does that mean?? ive had my reseller always tell me when i have some kind of issue(ie. crown having lines or not fitting correctly, too tight, etc.)
to go thru troubleshooting steps and they always say to use a new bur but to use theirs which they sell for $175 which is to me somewhat expensive.
Normally i use a $50 bur. And these are all diamond coated burs i am talking about.And i am milling zirconia.
I have a roland dwx-51d. i use 2mm, 1mm, and 0.6mm burs.
So if i use an more expensive higher end bur will the end result be actually different>?

Meaning would the crown be noticably or significantly different? ie Crowns dont fit.

Has anyone had any bad experiences with a "cheap bur""?

And also would a 2mm bur that is "no good" cause
crowns to be not fitting even though the 1mm bur is okay? my thinking on that is that the 1mm finishing bur would correct any miscut 2mm bur areas when it goes over
them. That is what my brain tells me however it does seem like a badly worn 2mm bur can cause crowns to not fit even by itself. Haven't really tested that out
but a few times it seemed like that was the issue.
So my question is this. If i am using cheaper burs but i am changing them at the recommended times then can i get the same results as if i were using more
expensive burs? If so, then i prefer the cheaper ones because i have dropped a new $200 bur before from like i think 3 inches high of the table and when it landed...broken.
I was very unhappy. i have granite countertops. After that i only used $50 burs.

Also, i really dislike how i am told by reseller that cheap burs might be the underlying cause of such a wide variety of problems....
and without explanations that really make sense to me a lot of times. Or they kinda get hung up on the fact that i have a cheap bur in my machine.
So that is why i am asking so i know what people might have experienced who actually are milling a lot. BTW, im not bagging on my reseller, i think they are great
but just they are tech support and maybe dont always have the best insight on real use.
 
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sidesh0wb0b

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So i was just wondering if anyone could tell me exactly how a expensive bur is better than a cheaper one in
regards to how they cut and perform. I know that the more expensive ones claim to last longer and cut
"better" but what exactly does that mean?? ive had my reseller always tell me when i have some kind of issue(ie. crown having lines or not fitting correctly, too tight, etc.)
to go thru troubleshooting steps and they always say to use a new bur but to use theirs which they sell for $175 which is to me somewhat expensive.
Normally i use a $50 bur. And these are all diamond coated burs i am talking about.And i am milling zirconia.
I have a roland dwx-51d. i use 2mm, 1mm, and 0.6mm burs.
So if i use an more expensive higher end bur will the end result be actually different>?

Meaning would the crown be noticably or significantly different? ie Crowns dont fit.

Has anyone had any bad experiences with a "cheap bur""?

And also would a 2mm bur that is "no good" cause
crowns to be not fitting even though the 1mm bur is okay? my thinking on that is that the 1mm finishing bur would correct any miscut 2mm bur areas when it goes over
them. That is what my brain tells me however it does seem like a badly worn 2mm bur can cause crowns to not fit even by itself. Haven't really tested that out
but a few times it seemed like that was the issue.
So my question is this. If i am using cheaper burs but i am changing them at the recommended times then can i get the same results as if i were using more
expensive burs? If so, then i prefer the cheaper ones because i have dropped a new $200 bur before from like i think 3 inches high of the table and when it landed...broken.
I was very unhappy. i have granite countertops. After that i only used $50 burs.

Also, i really dislike how i am told by reseller that cheap burs might be the underlying cause of such a wide variety of problems....
and without explanations that really make sense to me a lot of times. Or they kinda get hung up on the fact that i have a cheap bur in my machine.
So that is why i am asking so i know what people might have experienced who actually are milling a lot. BTW, im not bagging on my reseller, i think they are great
but just they are tech support and maybe dont always have the best insight on real use.
i have a 51d, and i prefer some of the "cheaper" brands over those pricey ones. not only because they are more cost effective when purchasing but mainly due to the fact that they have FAR outlasted those expensive sh!tty tools that the resellers told me i needed to use.
 
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Try and find out.
Sierra Tools have been great for me. But this all depends on the strategy being used. Faster start equals sharter tool life. But all my Ivo premium tools go 150hour no issues. Carbides 10hrs on Zr. Wax single flute goes for months, pmma 10hrs

Too many variables to say. But i have had cheape tools break on first impact with material. Sometimes its not worth it. It is a tool don't try to hard to save. But the down fall of expensive tools are they could break in the first minute and your out 150.00.
 
JKraver

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Tough to say are these expensive burs, expensive because of better metal, or grind or expensive because a better name brand on the box. Sometimes the same company makes them, sometimes the same company make them but uses a better metal for one of their brands. Maybe the company that makes fantastic burs the owner gets greedy and cuts cost? Consumable tools are just a crap shoot.
 
doug

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Sierra will re-brand, so there's that to keep an eye on.
 
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tuyere

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The biggest difference between quality tooling and mediocre mill tooling (i mean fluted cutting tools) (also note I didn't say 'expensive' and 'cheap', that's its own ball game) is quality control and the quality of the tool's grind and finishing.
For the first, cheap tools tend to come with way more duds, and the actual geometry of the tools will vary more from unit to unit. When I've bought big cheap 10-packs of end mills from Aliexpress or whatever, at least one or two of them are probably write-offs, that's something you should factor for when considering the cost.
For the second, the geometry of the cutting edge will be better, and will often take extra steps to get the best possible results. For example, relief grinds in lousy tools are often iffy and can need touching up with a diamond hone in really bad cases, the cutting edge is often less keen and will dull faster, and often lousy tools seem to have a wider range of hardnesses that effects the tool's realized lifespan.
You can often get excellent, well-made tools from cheap Chinese import lots, believe it or not. The catch is that you have to know how to evaluate the tools to know which ones aren't up to snuff, which ones need a little bit of love to become great tools, and which ones are immediate keepers. Get used to inspecting your end mills under a microscope, both brand new ones as well as used ones, you'll quickly see a lot of what makes a really sharp tool cut well and what makes a clapped-out tool perform poorly.
I also recommend grinding your own tools from HSS blanks to get a *really* good understanding of what makes conventional milling tools effective, but that's only useful if you run a metal or wood lathe, not a dental mill, so probably not useful to many people here :p
 
AaronW12321

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In my experience the price isn't really at all corelated with quality. We've ran 4 of our 51d's for years with Brassler brand burs (briefly swapped to sierra and then immetiately back). We don't change them until they break, we dont have any fit issues, occasional chipped margin out of the mill, but we design our margins at .05mm so kinda expected. We've got some burs with 500+ hours that are still trucking on
 
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AKDental

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The biggest difference between quality tooling and mediocre mill tooling (i mean fluted cutting tools) (also note I didn't say 'expensive' and 'cheap', that's its own ball game) is quality control and the quality of the tool's grind and finishing.
For the first, cheap tools tend to come with way more duds, and the actual geometry of the tools will vary more from unit to unit. When I've bought big cheap 10-packs of end mills from Aliexpress or whatever, at least one or two of them are probably write-offs, that's something you should factor for when considering the cost.
For the second, the geometry of the cutting edge will be better, and will often take extra steps to get the best possible results. For example, relief grinds in lousy tools are often iffy and can need touching up with a diamond hone in really bad cases, the cutting edge is often less keen and will dull faster, and often lousy tools seem to have a wider range of hardnesses that effects the tool's realized lifespan.
You can often get excellent, well-made tools from cheap Chinese import lots, believe it or not. The catch is that you have to know how to evaluate the tools to know which ones aren't up to snuff, which ones need a little bit of love to become great tools, and which ones are immediate keepers. Get used to inspecting your end mills under a microscope, both brand new ones as well as used ones, you'll quickly see a lot of what makes a really sharp tool cut well and what makes a clapped-out tool perform poorly.
I also recommend grinding your own tools from HSS blanks to get a *really* good understanding of what makes conventional milling tools effective, but that's only useful if you run a metal or wood lathe, not a dental mill, so probably not useful to many people here :p
just curious what is an hss blank?
 
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AKDental

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In my experience the price isn't really at all corelated with quality. We've ran 4 of our 51d's for years with Brassler brand burs (briefly swapped to sierra and then immetiately back). We don't change them until they break, we dont have any fit issues, occasional chipped margin out of the mill, but we design our margins at .05mm so kinda expected. We've got some burs with 500+ hours that are still trucking on
Wow! 500+hours?! My mind just got blown...didn't know that was possible with "any" bur.
On that note I remember the person who had the mill before me had a pair of burs that i think he said maybe aurident(was a while ago so maybe wrong co) had sent as sample test burs. And he had been using them for a really long time, like maybe 3 or 4 months, something like that. And i thought that
they were okay because they seemed to cut okay and the guy kept saying they were still good. A problem that i was having was with the crowns coming out with a very tight fit. When I changed the burs, perfect fit on crowns. Felt like punching myself in the face....

Also, so I spoke with a guy who was very knowledgable about the process of making milling burs and he had mentioned that one main difference
in the quality of the bur is the way that the diamonds are sintered or attached to the bur. According to him the really high end burs use a different
process by which the "diamond coating" is adhered to the carbide bur which results in the diamonds basically staying on there a much longer time.

I personally like the "cheaper" burs because of this. If I am having ill-fitting crowns, which happens more often than id like, I find it is very hard to diagnose and can be simple but many times requires many different troubleshooting of different equipment, softwares, etc to find out the reason. And one thing that could always be a problem is the bur. So if i am having a cheap bur in the machine then i don't really care if i just replace the bur and toss the old one. But if i
have an expensive one, like the $200 bur that I am using from Zahn.(i think i actually paid less but just checked and it is going for $200. jeez.) then i have to put it to the side carefully so i don't knick any part of the cutting areas and don't drop it....just something extra to worry about that i dont like. Yeah, sometimes the cheaper guys sell duds, but if i am using a dud and am having issues them ill just huck that bur and put in a new one.
 
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just curious what is an hss blank?
High Speed Steel, meaning tool steels that don't lose their temper as they heat up during machining. Pretty much the only game in town for mill tooling from ~ww2 until, I'd say the 70s? HSS is the universal material for 'entry level' cutting tools for traditional machining, and still extremely common in manual or hobby machining, roles where maximum productivity isn't the goal. Cheaper than carbide, not prone to thermal shock and brittle cracking like carbide, but you can't remove material as fast or run the tool as fast as you can with carbide.
It's also very easy to grind with common abrasive wheels, so sharpening your own tooling (or making it from scratch!) is practical for the amateur to do, and very instructive. Obviously you can't grind a four-flute end mill by hand, but I made myself a full set of single-point lathe bits from square blanks, as well as D-reamers and drills for milling. I can also regrind a snapped-off drill bit to re-create the cutting tip, it's a very useful party trick when you only have one drill left and need to finish a project by tomorrow.
M2 Tool Making 06 Birdcages Scraper Chisel Striking Awl.jpg
Not my own tools, but pretty illustrative of the kinds of simple machining tools you can make yourself by hand. HSS blanks are usually just the rectangular or round rods you see here, ground to suit the application by the machinist.


Dental techs don't exactly turn crowns by hand on a lathe so this isn't directly applicable to the trade, I don't think HSS tooling is even in use any more now that tiny well-made carbide mills are (relatively) cheap and accessible... but if you want to really understand cutting tools and their geometries, the best way in the world is to make yourself some tools from scratch.
 
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tuyere

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As a general rule for anybody buying milling burrs for dental purposes, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with machinist's suppliers, figuring out exactly what sorts of tools are being marked up and resold to you- what shank diameter does your mill require? how many flutes? what's the coating? helix angle? etc etc- and then buying directly from the source. Learning a little bit about industry tooling can pay enormous dividends, and you don't have to compromise on quality. You probably won't have a ton of selection because normal end mills have variable shank diameters vs. everything using a standardized shank, but you should still be able to find lots of workable options within that, for probably 1/3 the cost per tool or less.

For example, we needed a 4mm square end mill to run calibration cubes on our Rolands; 4mm end mills aren't used for normal production because, as I understand it, the DWX51/52-class machines don't have the torque or backbone or low-RPM drive to cut hard materials with such a (relatively) large tool. It's sold as a special accessory from Roland for over $100 per tool. I can't find that specific tool online but here's a comparable 3mm mill: https://usdentaldepot.com/30-flat-end-carbide-milling-bur-roland-zrb-100d
Here's an equivalent 3mm carbide end mill from a normal Canadian tooling supplier: https://www.kbctools.ca/itemdetail/5-310-088
$107.59 USD for the name-brand Roland tool, $12.79 CAD from KBC Tools.
Literally like 1/15th the cost, it's wild. The KBC tool isn't ~premium~ but it illustrates how dramatic the mark-up can be for this stuff.


e: look specifically for miniature end mills from tooling suppliers, they *do* use standardized shank diameters there in the same way that dental tooling does. KBC is Canadian and we still favour imperial for tooling because of the US being our main market, so they stock mini tooling standardized around 1/8" and 3/16" shanks, which isn't useful for our Rolands- but I'm sure other markets must have metric-based mini end mill systems that use the same shanks as dental mills do.
 
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tuyere

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Here you go, Travers Tool has lots of mini carbide ball mills with standardized 4mm shanks, 0.5mm radius and up- https://www.travers.com/category/ball-miniature-combo-end-mill?shank_diameter_3491[0]=4mm From a decent manufacturer, you're looking at, what, $25 a pop? They've got much smaller ball mill sizes in 3mm shanks, small enough to cover all your needs.
Gets pricier with coated tools, of course, and you can spend a looooot of money on tiny tooling with all the trimming and flash if you want, but no matter what you're buying, it all comes with far less of a markup than the dental offerings.
 
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Try and find out.
Sierra Tools have been great for me. But this all depends on the strategy being used. Faster start equals sharter tool life. But all my Ivo premium tools go 150hour no issues. Carbides 10hrs on Zr. Wax single flute goes for months, pmma 10hrs

Too many variables to say. But i have had cheape tools break on first impact with material. Sometimes its not worth it. It is a tool don't try to hard to save. But the down fall of expensive tools are they could break in the first minute and your out 150.00.
Which brand of milling machine are you using on this one?
 
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MrNeverFixit

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For rough cut (2mm) i use a lower price ones and for the margins (1.0mm) i use the sierra nano bur. it Works really well for me
 
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You should use what's works for you. i don't think you need to learn what's a relief angle is etc.. you need to test test test.
i believe most vendors will agree to send you samples.
at the end of the day the point is not counting the hours or finding the cheapest offer, the point is to find the milling burs you can trust, that you know how to work with so you wont get broken works.
as a dental technician you have enough on your mind you don't need to worry about milling burs.
if you will find a milling burs you can work with for 100 hours than the changes in prices per crown milled will be insignificant.
 
JVitto

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I too have burs with 500 hrs on them. The first time I had a set that did over 300 hrs nobody believed me.
I packed them up with screen shot proof and took them to an Expo that was going on in Orlando, Fl.
With 3 pucks I got greater than 40 crowns out of them. No body said that was true too. Well... it is all in understanding what your working with.
I since have had multiple burs 300-500hrs. Now I also have burs with 45 hrs on them that started chipping margins.
Remember its all in the tech using the equipment. Understand your mill, and what you are asking of it, read alot and learn about your milling Strategy.
Design with in your mills abilities, test, and be teachable. I knew nothing about milling, printing, or even designing crowns 10 yrs ago.
Now I like to think I am someone other labs can trust to get them out of sticky situations...sometimes..lol
I use Cardinal's PDCRD-002, DCRD-003 AND DCRD-OO4 for all my needs from copings to screw retained crowns:)
 
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You also have to consider who you're buying from. If you've got a Zirkon Zahn for example, as far as I know they only offer non coated burs. Simple reason is, it's a consumable. They make more money. So getting burs from others manufacturers with coating is a then a wiser economic choice.

Most burs can be used for all materials but there will be some advantages on certain geometries, for example when VHF released CAM 8 I noticed you now had an optional PMMA bur with one teeth, which is more efficient when cutting, at the end of the day the shape and form is just like when (used to) mill gold, cobalt, silicone, plaster etc
Burs are made of alloys designed not just to be stiff but also be elastic and absorb the forces, since they're so long, could be different for milling titanium and glass though.
Take this with a grain of salt as I'm no expert, just how I feel about it.
In general you'll find very informative content on the VHF website.
But yeah, I guess tests tests test are the only things to do after having basic theory.
 
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