For me personally, I was a bit fearful when I first decided to work with Ti.....so many "urban legends" and all. After learning to work with it, I actually perfer it to most other materials. The reason? Its so consistent, meaning that every single piece of Ti you work with (provided its the same grade) works the same.....no hard or soft spots, no one area milling, drilling, or grinding differently from another.
Personally I use a lot of the same type of tooling that I do for steel, the trick is to understand that you must change the speeds and feeds. Of course I'd love to use ONLY carbide on it, but like most I have to balance between what will get the job done, with what my pocketbook will allow.
Drills tend to be cobalt, and I save my $$ for carbide end mills.
For me drilling was were I had to change my methods the most...if you try to "bull" you way through a piece of Ti, you either end up wrecking a drill bit at the least, or at the worst end of welding the bit to the Ti. I use what I call "tap drilling", meaning that I use light "taps" of the drill bit to remove a bit of material, then let the bit up, add a drop of collant, and do it all again, until I make my way through. When it comes to milling, I think a person is money ahead using carbide....it just does everything better when it come to Ti.
The biggest differene I found with Ti versus steel is that Ti gets a lot of burrs on the exit side of holes and other cut operations. When it comes to grinding on Ti, slow speeds and sharp belts are the ticket....grind too hard on a piece of Ti, and it creates a burr that won't "knock" off like to will on steel.....the only way to get it off is to actually grind off the burr.
That all might sound scary, but its not......as with any material we use, it just takes a bit of learning HOW to work it, and once you figure it out, its "easy".
