Helical makes the best endmills considering price and what they do for you. Hanita used to be my favorite but Helical displaced them a few years back. Had my Ingersoll rep out here one day, Ingersoll supplies almost all my carbide insert tooling, and I asked him about the Ingersoll carbide end mills. Basically what it boiled down to was stick with Helical. Part of what makes Helical tools worthwhile is the research that has gone into speeds and feeds and their Milling Advisor which I intend to talk about today.
Now named Helical Machining Advisor Pro received today an email today to sign up. Now I have a bone to pick with Helical and have had for some time over their Advisor policy. Before you were forced to go online to down load the catalogue and program to each PC you wanted it on. Ten mills/lathes with a PC on each one you have to download this thing ten times for your programmers to use it. Now besides the absurdity of having to do the same thing ten times you also have to go online ten times and breach your security to do so. Have any of you read any sort of things in the past year regarding online hacking? Yes I thought so and we all know darned good and well Helical has too.
So anyway off to this new wonder site with the only PC I have that is allowed online today to check it out because of this…….
Now I happen to believe in privacy as much as is possible. I use Firefox because of the great privacy/addons there, and Duck Duck Go for my search engine for the same reason. Avoiding Google, Facebook, Twitter and all that junk as much as possible because of the data mining and it is impossible to stop it. Linkedin is my perfect example of this. They got into my email list one time WITHOUT permission and I still am asked to link with people they could not have known about otherwise years later. Linkedin is kept only because of this blog and never sent money so I don’t get the things that used to be free any more.
Well well well loging for the first time I am told I have to install Google Chrome. Long time Firefox user thank you so I proceed on. Can’t do a darned thing and darned sure can’t check out how it is supposed to work offline as promised. Don’t see how you could do this anyway even though they promised it would since there is “nothing to download” to make it work.
My concerns have been expressed to Helical in the past because I want to use their program and can prove I buy their products but I don’t go online with my workstations so I can’t install their program on the workstations that need it. This new evolution of theirs is a quantum leap in the wrong direction and caters to the cloud idiots who apparently don’t mind what is stolen from them online. Wonder if Helical will indemnify you for data breaches because you have to go online for this wonderful thing? Like all companies that force you online as a condition of use the answer is no. The hypocrisy is pretty amazing and you know Helical has lots of proprietary info they never let online because their stuff has value to them. Sadly YOUR stuff does not have value to them and they could care less if you lose it.
I have nothing but utter contempt for companies that have such a cavalier regard for users. Yes I get that it took time and money to make the program. So two things can be done. Helical only sells through vendors. They have customer numbers and can provide proof of purchases quite easily so there is verification method #1 for stand alone downloads to be put on as many PC’s as that company owns for internal use. The next thing is if you are going to be so anal about it then SELL it to me. I would buy a stand alone copy at a reasonable price even though I would have thought being a customer would be enough.
As it stands right now this compounding of their offenses against users really rubs me the wrong way. Went there and had a look and guess that’s as far as it goes this time around. Not doing Chrome or Google and for sure not going online to use a speeds and feeds doodad from a company that cares so little about my concerns. I don’t know what idiot at Helical came up with this grand new paradigm but sure can say that if I can find another vendor who has good cutters and a good S&F program to I will leave.
Machined Audio Horn Lens 