CNCCookbook 2017 End Mill Brand Survey Winners

Note: This is an older survey.  Check out the latest 2018 version instead.

Thanks to every who participated in our 2017 End Mill Survey (almost 300 votes cast for 105 brands), we’re ready to present the results.

To make it easier to see trends, I’m using the same format I did for the 2016 End Mill Survey.  that means I am dividing the results into 3 Tiers:

• Tier 1:  The most popular brands. These brands account for 70% of the votes.
• Tier 2:  Adds another 25%.  Taken together Tier 1 and Tier 2 account for 95% of votes.
• Tier 3:  Less well-known brands that make up the remaining 5% of votes.

Let’s see what we’ve got!

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 top 3 brands were Harvey Tools, Accupro, and Niagara.  Compared to last year, Accupro moved up to replace OSG.  It had been #4 in 2016 while Niagara was #2 and OSG was #3.

Accupro is MSC’s house brand in case you didn’t know.

Other movements from 2016 – 2017:

• YG-1 and Garr are right where they were in 2016.
• Kennametal, Onsrud moved up, perhaps at the expense of SFS and Iscar.
• Amana, Kyocera, and Helical Solutions made huge jumps from Tier 2 to get on Tier 1.
• Seco, Micro 100, Imco, and Melin moved off Tier 1 and onto Tier 2.

A lot of this is normal market fluctuation, but some of the bigger moves reflect expanding market share and perhaps an increase in our CNC Router readership given brands like Amana.

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:

There are a lot of great brands in the second tier.

Third Tier End Mill Brands

Here are the remainder of the brands you voted for:

Why 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:

Best Value remains the leading reason at 72%, although it is down from 79% last year.  Best Value means buyers are seeking good performance for a good price.

Cheap is up from 3% to 7%, while Maximum Performance is up from 18% to 21%.

Which end mills did each group of buyers prefer?

Wouldn’t it be great to see the Top 3 brands for Best Value, Max Performance, and Cheap?

I’m just finishing up that analysis now, but to get it, 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.