Surface-coated cermet cutting tool with hard coating layer exhibiting excellent chipping resistance in high-speed intermittent cutting

A surface-coated cermet cutting tool, formed by depositing on a surface of a tool substrate made of tungsten carbide-based cermeted carbide or titanium carbonitride-based cermet a hard-coating layer comprising the following layers (a) and (b):

• (a) a lower layer comprising one or more layers of titanium carbide layer, titanium nitride layer, titanium carbonitride layer, titanium carboxide layer, and titanium oxycarbonitride layer and has a total average layer thickness in the range of 3 to 20 μm,
• (b) a upper layer is an aluminum oxide layer having an α-type crystal structure when chemically deposited and having an average layer thickness in the range of 1 to 15 μm;
• wherein the α-Al2O3 layer shows distribution graphs of covalent lattice points of constituent atoms, which shows distribution ratios of individual ΣN+1 to total ΣN+1, having a highest peak at Σ3 and showing the distribution ratios of Σ3 to total ΣN+1 in the range of 60 to 80% when electron beam is radiated to crystal grains in a measuring range of polished surfaces so as to measure inclination angles between normal lines of plane (0001) and plane (10-10), crystal planes of the crystal grains, and a normal line of the polished surface by using a field-emission-type scanning electron microscope, the crystal grains have a corundum-type hexagonal close-packed structure in which constituent atoms consisting of aluminum and oxygen exist in lattice points;
• the distribution of the lattice points, which are the covalent lattice points of constituent atoms, where the respective constituent atoms share one constituent atom between adjacent crystal grains at an interface of the crystal grains are calculated on the basis of the inclination angles obtained from the measurement;
• a covalent lattice point configuration of constituent atoms, in which N, where is any even number equal to or greater than two in consideration of the corundum-type hexagonal close-packed structure, but if an upper limit of N from the viewpoint of distribution frequencies is 28, even numbers such as 4, 8, 14, 24, and 26 do not exist, lattice points sharing no constituent atom among the covalent lattice points of constituent atoms exist is represented by ΣN+1,
• wherein the hard-coating layer exhibits excellent chipping resistance in a high-speed intermittent cutting.