Torus cutters are increasingly used in machining high-hardness materials because of high processing efficiency. However, due to the large hardness variation in assembled hardened steel workpiece, the tool wear occurs easily in machining process. This severely affects the machined surface quality. Here, we conduct a research on the tool wear and the machined surface quality in milling assembled hardened steel mold with a torus cutter. The experimental results show the abrasive wear mechanism dominates the initial tool wear stage of the torus cutter. As the tool wear intensifies, the adhesive wear gradually occurs due to the effect of alternating stress and impact load. Thus, the mixing effect of the abrasive and adhesive wears further accelerates tool wear, resulting in occurrence of obvious crater wear band on the rake face and coating tearing area on the flank face. Finally, the cutter is damaged by the fatigue wear mechanism, reducing seriously the cutting performance. With increase of flank wear, moreover, there are increasingly obvious differences in both the surface morphology and the cutting force at the two sides of the joint seam of the assembled hardened steel parts, including larger height difference at the two sides of the joint seam and sudden change of cutting force, as a result, leading to decreasing cutting stability and deteriorating seriously machined surface quality.
