The cutting of secondary wood based products imposes one of the most aggressive cutting conditions [1-2]. Thus, they are utilized in order to test the efficacy of ductile interlayers in the cutting performance of hard coatings characteristics for high-speed cutting. Sputtered TiAlN monolithic coating was selected as hard coating and deposited on high speed steel and cemented carbide, and their mechanical behaviour compared with multilayers based on it, with different number of submicron ductile metal layers. New multilayer coatings have been deposited in order to minimize the residual stress and to increase the adhesion of the coatings without falling all other mechanical properties typical of the hard coatings, such as hardness and Young's modulus. Several ductile metals have been studied as interlayers and among them titanium and aluminium have performed the best mechanical characteristics. In fact, the adhesion of multilayer coatings with these metallic interlayers attained an increase of more than 100% relatively to the monolithic TiAlN coatings, while for the interlayer titanium the residual stress remain at low compressive levels (similar to2 GPa) when the substrate is high speed steel or has a decrease when the substrate is cemented carbide. Moreover, the introduction of these metallic interlayers did not almost perturb the other mechanical properties. The benefit of multilayer coatings is evident and the results from the ability of some ductile interlayers to reduce cutting stresses, which lead the elimination of the preliminary sharp edge failure, determinant for the tool behaviour during the cutting of secondary wood based products. During the cutting the mechanisms of multilayer failure are in essential similar to bulk composites structurally analogous.