End-mill cutter is the most commonly used cutting tool in metal machining industry, especially flat end-mill and fillet end-mill, which provide significant influence on machining efficiency and quality.

Nickel-based high temperature alloy is widely used in aerospace industry due to its excellent performance of mechanical property under rigorous situation. However, it possesses poor machinability and rEqires very high cutting force during milling process. In addition, vibration is another factor which should be taken into consideration.

Variable pitch end-mill is one kind of end-mill cutters that have different parameters in pitch and flute. In this category of design, each integrated cutting feature, namely, bottom, fillet, side, flute and gash are different. Meanwhile, it also can reducesthe vibration effectively.

FEA simulation is a time saving and cost saving way in the field of cutting tool design and optimization. An efficient and accurate modeling method is demanded due tothe complexity geometry of end-mill cutter.

A lot of research was conducted on end-mill modelingpreviously.However,most of them focused on symmetric geometry end-mill and there were no introduction about gash modeling.Based on the above reasons, a feature-based modeling method with parametric design is proposed. According to the characteristic of end-mill and based on the mathematic Equations, eachfeature is designed and modeled individually. Constraints of gash are analyzed and applied. In addition, a customized program is developed with the combination of Visual Basic user interface and CATIA macro programing technique. Finally, a simulation example of the model is conducted to analyze the dynamics during cutting process.