CNCCookbook 2016 End Mill Survey Winners (Drumroll, Please!)

Nearly 1300 votes were cast for various endmill brands in our recent survey, and there were some 93 different end mill brands represented-WOW!

The response to the survey has been amazing, and now it's time to present the results.  I have divided those results into 3 tiers since there are so many brands to consider.

First Tier End Mill Brands

Collectively, this tier garnered 70% of the votes, so they have most of the market share for this audience.

Here is how you voted for these end mills:

The given text appears to be empty. Please provide text for rephrasing.

Tier 1 End Mill Votes

The top 3 brands were Harvey Tools, Niagara, and OSG.  This was exactly the same top 3 in the same order as last year's endmill survey.  In fact, Accupro was also in 4th place last year.

After that, there was quite a bit of moving around between the two years:

• Kennametal and Iscar, two monster brands, fell off in favor of YG-1 (10th place in '15 moved to 5th) and Garr (moving from 22nd to 6th!).
• I have to give special mention to Lakeshore Carbide for scoring so highly while being a relatively small manufacturer relative to some of the giants nearby on the list.  They moved from 26th to 11th place.  I guess Carl (Lakeshore's owner) takes good care of his customers!
• Guhring, Hertel, and SGS showed steady progress, moving higher in the rankings.

It's always interesting to watch these market share shifts over time.

Second Tier End Mill Brands

Collectively, the second tier garnered another 25% of the votes, which brings the total market share of First and Second Tier to 95%.

Here is how you voted for these end mills:

Tier 2 End Mill Votes

Lots of very well-known brands in this category.  I want to make special mention of Fraisa, which got more write-in votes (called out in the "Other" category on the survey) than any other brand.

Third Tier End Mill Brands

Here are the remainder of the brands you voted for:

Tier 3 End Mill Brands

What are You Buying?

Obviously just straight up brand popularity doesn't tell the whole story on which end mills might be worth looking into.  We also asked the survey respondents why they were buying with 3 choices:

• Maximize production performance
• Best balance of value + performance
• Cheapest

Here's the result:

End Mill Purchase Criteria

The overwhelming majority of you are seeking a good balance of value and performance, while all-out production performance ranks #2.  Very few shop for price alone, which is good news as it's hard to get any kind of decent results with cheap endmills.

But here's where it gets interesting.  Which end mills did each group of buyers prefer?

To find out, you need to be a CNCCookbook newsletter subscriber.  You can sign up right below.  Once you do, you'll gain access to a variety of premium CNCCookbook content which we add to constantly, plus you'll receive a weekly digest of CNCCookbook's blog posts.  We'll also send you a few emails that tell you what our "Greatest Hits" articles have been over time.

So go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to get your exclusive premium CNCCookbook content, including the drilldown on these Endmill survey results.  Existing subscribers-I'll send you an email shortly with a link to the new report.