Lathe tooling

Rotaxpower

Rotaxpower

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Not sure if this is the right forum for this, but any way where is everyone buying there tooling for there lathes? I just picked up a lathe and it came with some tooling, but want to pick up some more cutters. Are the replaceable carbide tip cutters the way to go? Thanks all.
 
I use more HSS than carbide. On hard material, or taking the chrome plating off a hyd cyl shaft, carbide rules. Cheap Chinese carbide is crap. Hearing that telltale little "tic" when you lose the tip of a ten dollar cutter makes me cringe.
 
For the vast majority of gunsmithing you will need HSS bits you can grind to shape. Rarely is carbide required.
 
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metalbender said:
I use more HSS than carbide. On hard material, or taking the chrome plating off a hyd cyl shaft, carbide rules. Cheap Chinese carbide is crap. Hearing that telltale little "tic" when you lose the tip of a ten dollar cutter makes me cringe.
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+1 on HSS. It's more forgiving than (Chinese) carbide, and there is lots of high-quality, USA-made HSS available on ebay if you are patient and buy in lots when they come in with lots of things in the sizes you need. I have spent more than I planned on ebay vendor "stm_surplus"

If you need "tooling" along the lines of chucks, collets, tool posts, etc, again, ebay alerts are your friend. But be patient. I have a Hardinge L18 tool post, and the inserts come up from time to time, but actual selling prices range from $40 to $200.

Go to www.practicalmachinist.com and troll the sub-forum for the particular make/model of your lathe, and see what people are saying about tooling.

Good luck!
 
Replacable carbide are good for removing a lot of material fast with lot of power.

I use soldered carbide to clean rust ( soldered carbide tooling can be grinded with silicone carbide grinding wheel
98% of the time, I use cobalt HSS which I grind on a belt sander( viel)
 
guntech said:
For the vast majority of gunsmithing you will need HHS bits you can grind to shape. Rarely is carbide required.
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You mean HSS. High Speed Steel
A few little tricks about High speed steel.
1) Its infinatly shapable to make custom form tooling
2) The higher cobalt content steel seem to hold up to tough jobs better
3) By heating the bit to dull red heat and quenching in Urine! (AFTER grinding to profile)....you can get a tool bit that will cut almost as hard of a meterial as carbides will....but is sharpenable and formable.

Learned the last one from an old timer who swore that the salt and nitrogen in Urine was the perfect quenching medium for the job. I've tried it and I must say that I found 4140 to not take of the edge as fast as with standard HSS but not quite up to carbide strength.
What ever your choise of tooling remember the first three rules in your set up.
1)Ridgid
2)Ridgid
3)Ridgid
 
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zuke said:
Busy Bee and EBAY
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Busy Bee sells afordable tools....but they are S***!
I bought a 45deg 1/2 dovetail cutter that was a HSS cutting surface WELDED to a medium carbon steel shank to cut costs.
The cutter must have had .040" of run out as it was welded on crooked!!!!!......all for only $57.99

If you want HSS tooling look for brads from eastern Europe, ex Soviet /Com-block countries. Donier of Poland, Sowa of Serbia etc. Buttefield of Canada and Starett of USA make great tooling but you pay through the nose for it.
 
dero338 said:
Replacable carbide are good for removing a lot of material fast with lot of power.

I use soldered carbide to clean rust ( soldered carbide tooling can be grinded with silicone carbide grinding wheel
98% of the time, I use cobalt HSS which I grind on a belt sander( viel)
Click to expand...

I also use my 2"x72" zirconium belt sander to sharpen tools. Does an excelent job and the rake/relief can be set with the platen angle.
Only a green wheel will touch the tougher carbide...and even then its difficult with some of the coated carbides
 
+1 for KBC. Their cheap stuff is way better than anything you'll ever see at Canadian tire/Princess/BB and if you're budget allows you to go higher end they have good stock.

Insert tooling can be handy, but it's more for high volume users who don't have the time to grind or shape fresh tools regularly.

Tubalcain has some good youtube vids on tool making as well as some others. If you're doing it for fun, not profit, it's a good way to go. You save cash and improve your end result with your own custom tooling.
 
For most gun related stuff and hobby jobs HSS is fine. I still use some of it for form tools.
I primarily use carbide inserts though but it takes fairly rigid machines and some experience to get your money out of them. Lots of the myths about carbide are 30-40yr old stuff that is bs today. I've got carbides that cut plastic like HSS never could, that will take .0002" cuts on inconel and all in between. But fact is at $120-200+ for a box of 10. It's not every gunsmith or hobby guy that will be buying them for every holder... adds up real fast.

Gotta have the right tools for the job, hobby guys usually have lots of extra time to spare anyhow and most gun related work doesn't deal with high SFM.
Grinding HSS bits should be done on a decent A-O wheel. M-2 from China is actually pretty darn decent HSS, like the bit busy-bee usually sells. I've got Osborn and others fancier things and really, those M-2 hold up just fine or better in some cases.
A few brazed carbides never hurts to have on hand but I haven't used those in many years.

I buy a bit from KBC, watch for their specials/discounts of which they're doing quite a few of this year. Doesn't take long to sign up on their website and you can get the emails of new offers.
I also like dealing with local vendors specialized in dealing with shops, mainly DGI, but most cities have quite a few choices.
Buy good taps... I like OSG cause they're easy to get around here. Cheap taps can cost a lot...
 
Only time id recomment carbide is for threading, makes it soooooooo much easier for set up and threading.

HSS is good for most stuff but requires coolant, not always an option when a lathe can go untouched for weeks if not months at a time. So carbide can be good there as coola t is not used with carbide inserts.
 
In a home shop you can do all you need with HSS and Carbide with a brush and a small can of coolant, spray bottle can also be great for drilling and one of good cutting oil to brush on lightly when needed. I like Cooltool2, tolerable smell(its Tall oil based so it smells a bit like wood) and has great performance(I've tried many...). Good ventilation is rather important regardless.

In the industry carbide is run with coolant nearly always, definitely for CNC turning work, Steel is one of the few exceptions and even that depends.
Manual machines are just a pain and messy to try to run flood coolant on.
 
ciphery said:
I also use my 2"x72" zirconium belt sander to sharpen tools. Does an excelent job and the rake/relief can be set with the platen angle.
Only a green wheel will touch the tougher carbide...and even then its difficult with some of the coated carbides
Click to expand...

Where do you buy your zirconium belts?
 
KBC has some of them, they do last longer than Al-oxide belts.
I still wouldn't try to sharpen HSS toolbits or drills properly on one a belt...
 
Carbide tooling works well on a bigger and heavier lathe. But if the one you bought is one of the smaller and lighter ones you'll find that HSS works out better. HSS will take a sharper edge than many carbides so it cuts with less drag. In particular the negative rake holders and replaceable carbide tips don't cut so much as plow the metal away. And it takes a strong lathe to do that cleanly. HSS is also more tolerant of a newbie's mistakes.

There's some good tips about the various quality levels of HSS blanks in this thread. But for 99.9% of your work the basic cheap HSS blanks from Busy Bee or KMS will work out just fine.

A grinder set up with a white or pink aluminium oxide wheel on one side for HSS and a green silicon carbide on the other for your carbide tipped cutters is one thing you'll need sooner instead of later. The regular wheels that come on grinders barely touches HSS and just polishes carbide tips.

Then of course there's boring bars, holders and a host of other things you'll need to buy or make. Don't be in a hurry to buy everything right away. Making your own tooling is a great way to learn how to use your new lathe.
 
Kbc has good stuff , don't waste your time with HSS, takes lots of skill to sharpen it too work properly, something the hobby machinist lacks, takes long time to learn tool grinding skills
 
Here's what I have learned as a very novice hobby lathe and mill user. I have a busy bee 9x20 sieg lathe, good support on the users group and worth doing all the updates they recommend. Buy good quality stuff, research it, use ebay like others have posted. Buy hss cutters in different sizes and dedicate a bench grinder to making the shapes like others have posted. After throwing money away on indexable cutters and other insert cutters, I have abandoned them. They may look versatile or even long lasting but I had nothing but trouble with them, likely due to buying the cheaper ones. If you can build holders and boring bars rather then buy them, well worth the experience. Make sure your machine is as ridgid as possible, follow the constraints of your machine, as in do not feed more then your machine can handle. A great source for manual lathe books used to be lindsay publishing but they have gone out of business, Dave Gingery's son still sells his books and they are great for learning how to work a lathe and use hand tools to make well the whole machine shop. I have the whole set of books and looking this up just saw that they have the set in hard cover.

http://gingerybooks.com/

As I have no formal training in lathe use this is all but my personal recommendation.
 
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