Near-dry machining attracts increasing attentions for environmental and economical benefits and MQL machining has been recognized as the most representative near-dry method. Recent concern for environmentally friendly manufacturing further encourages the attempts at applying near-dry operations to machining of difficult-to-cut materials. Since stainless steels have been considered to be a sort of difficult-to-cut material, this paper investigated the cutting performance of various near-dry methods, that is regular MQL and hybrid mist operations, in end milling of four different stainless steels from the view point of the longer tool life. As a result, it was found that the near-dry machining demonstrated the effectiveness in elongating the tool life and this effectiveness depended on the types of the stainless steels.
