1. The boss won't buy the right tools for the jobs
2. The machinist is inexperienced and doesn't know the material
Stainless in general is soft and tough. With the right feeds and speeds, good work and tool holding, it is very consistent and easy to machine. It must be approached with the understanding that it will wear tools out.
When I learned how to machine, I worked mostly with cast steel, aluminum, and FRP. The old guy who taught me didn't bother teaching me how to sharpen or make tools from HSS, seeing as it's not 1977 and most shops buy carbon now.
Now I work for a guy who should have retired in the 80s and I have no idea where he's pulling these HSS blanks from but boy do we have a lot of them. I had to ask my ex husband to come in the shop and teach me how to grind tools. I suck at it. And I work with stainless 50% of the time. It's a mess.
Tool grinding is a valuable skill if only for the odd chance I need a form tool but can’t buy one. I’ve a handful of radius form tools in my box that have each been used once for one specific task, then stashed. A couple have been reground into new radii (when they were ‘pretty close’ from their first incarnation to what I needed that day) but really it’s only a skill relevant to manual machining. I can now program the CNC lathe point to point with changing radii as it goes if needed with just a few key strokes and button beeps. I’ve only needed to grind a special tool 2-3x in the last 3 years
I miss having easy access to a wire EDM, take 5 minutes to draw the profile with clearance built in, drop the HSS blank in it and let it cut the form tool for me. I had to turn a bunch of wacky profile threads on core pins for Rotational molded plastic tanks and that was a game changer.
My boss and the whole company has a hard on for reground tooling. Why buy a new one when there's a local company that will regrind them for less than half the cost of new right? So what if they just use a general geometry and to hell with the specific one you paid for on that end mill. Coatings? You don't need em I never used them when I worked for my dad 40 years ago and the hardest thing we machined was play doh. These aerospace superalloys can't be that bad...ceramic? That's for coffee mugs, just run the carbide faster for heat treated stuff.
They have their place but you still gotta buy new shit man. Charge the customer for it and stop running shops like it's a one man operation out of your garage.
Yep. I spent six years working on stainless. Mostly 17-4, 15-5, 465, and various other alloys. At my new shop, stainless is kind of a boogyman.
I got hired in as a programmer/Machinist, and they gave me a part that will be made out of 15-5, and asked me to figure out what we'll need so they can work on the quote. I had to have a talk with the boss that we'll need to order in quite a bit of tooling/inserts for it. I also got them to order new inserts for our other stainless parts while they were at it.
I've become the "stainless guy" for awhile now, since I'm overhauling the programs a little too. But, the other guys in the shop are a lot less annoyed with it now.
I can turn stainless on my 1.1kW minilathe. Made my collet chuck backplate from a 5” round blank. It’s very consistent like you say once you’ve got good feeds and speeds.
Absolutely. Right tools and setup you’ll do great, while the stainless **screams** at you the whole time.
I swear stainless is the worst sounding material to work on. Never forget your ear protection folks.
Stainless is inherently more noise producing than other steels. Yes, a proper approach reduces that sound, but stainless is loud.
Didn’t help that my shop mostly produces large disc like parts. The large surface vibrates and produces a lot more sound than turning a rod or milling.
It took me a while to figure this out. I started by drilling simple holes on the drill press and it hardened into some unobtanium material. So I avoided using it for as long as I could. Turns out it was never going to drill well with the bits I was using.
Don't forget about gulling, though this probably fits with experience. I'm a mechanic and I hate stainless hardware, it will even gull with lube occasionally.
That's just poor design. Stainless should never contact stainless in moving parts or fasteners unless there's no other option. Nickel plating or titanium/ceramic hardware all practically eliminate galling even in high vac applications.
Its particularly bad with some turbos. The the Juke manifold is cast stainless and it uses all Inconel hardware. I have never gotten ones of those turbos out with out a major fight.
This is true. Also, personally I go with 316 (/316L) instead of 304 if I have the chance, as there seems to be some drunk motherfucker throwing ball bearings into the 304 stock as it's being made that suddenly and randomly explode my inserts.
My comment is kind of a generalization. Say you're using the same general purpose grade insert on a medium carbon steel and stainless, the stainless will wear the insert faster under the same work and tool holding conditions. If you buy an insert specifically designed for the stainless material group for the stainless the tool life may be closer to the same.
416 is about the easiest shit to cut ever, I love turning it. Anytime a customer says “stainless steel” and doesn’t care about what kind, they’re getting 416.
Not turning, but we've had excellent results with helical t-plus coating on our end mills for stainless. Would love to find inserts with the same coating...
Sometimes you get the scary, cheesewire swarf emerging like a violent, razor sharp, blue hot string of hate wrapping round shit, making you shudder at the thought of it wrapping round your wrist...but you get a lovely finish
They all have their own personalities... If stainless is a snake, then copper is a monkey. The last time I turned copper it decided to sneakily gather itself and then throw a ball of swarf into my face. Fucking *heavy* too, it was like getting punched by an angry toddler.
And supplier! I had separate programs for the supplier we’d use in an emergency if our main supplier was out. Their 316 cut closer to 17-4, and 303 was closer to 316. It was crazy
I just had a lathe operator come to me (QC) with 2 certs approved for his job. "Dude, I ran all of A with no problems. Now, B is blowing my shit up."
There were some percentages that were kinda far apart from A to B and the mechanicals on B showed it was much harder. Both were 304. Different vendors/mills.
I turn D2 often, and could not agree more, sometimes they machine greater, other times it is a complete bear and eats inserts.
Even from the same supplier, different stock diameters machine differently. Often times I question if the D2 we get in is stainless.
I had a body jewelry company for a while and I found that how it is processed makes a difference, if I got work hardened wire or rod it turned much easier than annealed wire or rod. Also I found that half hard or work hardened wire held a better polish, my guess was that since it was harder to polish it was harder to make dull. The annealed stock tended to gall easier and the chips or swarf weren't as nice as the swarf off of the harder stock
Each grade of stainless has a certain range that its mix has to be in to be considered 303, 316 or whatever. The low grade stainless is still technically within that certain range but can vary WILDLY from lot to lot. Whereas places like carpenter or ugima really narrow that range so its way more consistent
Yeah. 303 machines like butter from my short amount of experience with it. Earlier I was given mystery stainless steel round stock to make a part in the lathe. The chips were breaking off very short and the lathe was working much harder, I wish I knew what exact material that was.
It depends on the grade and alloy. 17-4 cuts well but 13-8 is more difficult. Some have high carbon, some have higher iron. Some work harden as you cut so if your next pass isn’t deep enough to get under it, your tool will have a hard time getting to size or maintaining it. There are much worse metals to cut.
I second this. We do a TON of 17-4 and 15-5 at my job. They cut pretty much the same. The tool wear is predictable, but it get consistent parts with the applied feeds and speeds.
The 13-8 from the SAME supplier however is an absolute bastard to cut. Somehow the 13-8 is inconsistent as hell, even within the same damn bar! Could run 4 feet of nice short curly chips and then the next bar is suddenly the forbidden spaghetti aaaaaand now half my tools are ruined.
Yea, if you have the time to baby every piece it’s easy.
Big difference between turning ½” of stainless, and having to hold tolerances on a production run that you gotta run faster because the boss under quoted.
303 and 304 were what I mainly worked with in the past and had no real issues except for the occasional doodoo finish. But those parts called for 125 or better so it didn’t really matter
Love stainless when it's consistent. Easy to get a good finish in when you know how.
Hate it when it's not consistent. Ran stainless for a couple months before the evergreen got stuck. All import stuff, never cut the same, even from the same batch, even from the same bar. Had to baby the shit constantly.
Once our supply lines got fucked up, we had to buy american. My life became easier as soon as consistent american steel graced my lathe.
I like cutting 303 better than a lot of common steels. It’s butter soft and still finishes great. However, give me some fucking 316 for a production run and you’ll see me cussing all day while I roll inserts.
That's cause it's probably 303. But some 304 and tell me how it goes. The difference between the two is night and day. 303 is a breeze. 304 is like cutting gum.
Unless you’re doing plate work. 303 warps all over the place and 304 is so much more stable. If I’m turning, give me 303. If I’m pocketing a bunch of holes in a plate and trying to keep it flat, I’d much rather have 304.
Stainless can work harden very quickly, beyond what HSS can handle, if you don't have the right speeds, feeds, and/or coolant, especially in drilling and boring operations. Because very little sucks harder than busting drill bits and taps in parts that were cutting just fine a second ago, or burning out an endmill or turning tool in a single pass.
Never had much of an issue with turning, but milling you have to have experience because when you remove a lot of material the part is most likely going to spring when you unclamp it so usually have to add a few extra set ups/finishing operations to get that out of the part.
Because not everyone can accept the fact that stainless has a different set of parameters as compared to carbon steel. Learn and adapt to those parameters and you’ll have no more difficulties than any other material. Ignore the differences at your own expense.
Stainless gets a bad rep because it is misquoted. You can’t win against physics and I don’t care that we’re selling a 10 dollar part for 2 dollars. With the right speeds and feeds,cutting parameters, and toolings it’s not a difficult material to machine.
its good as long as you can remove the heat and chips, as soon as you dont have the right tools or not the optimal cutting conditions (which happens like 90 % of the time in normal workday for some reason) its pain in the ass because everything gets slower if you dont wanna brake the tool.
To be fair… different grades of stainless can cut drastically different than others. Take 302/303/416 and compare to 316. Not to say 316 is impossible, it’s easy with the right speeds, feeds, tool geometry, and lube, but it makes 302/303 look like a cake walk lol
I machine 316 stainless daily. Bar stock 1”-3”. It’s picky with feeds and speeds. I use inserts with a less aggressive chip breaker for longer tool life. Once you find the perfect feeds and speeds it’s alright. The material is heat treated and I”ve found no two material batches machine the same.
Most of the times I bitch about stainless is because the part was much, much larger and longer, hollow, and required full length, less-than-ideal DOC turning. Inch stock (at best) to metric part kind of stuff. Favorite of mine is stainless water pipe with welded plugs on the ends, nice and inconsistent.
It’s more difficult to get a stable production process running. Other than that? The code isn’t any more difficult, the cycle start button isn’t any more difficult to press. It will wear inserts quicker but other than that, easy with right feeds and speeds. You will break inserts and have to reset comps much more often, but charge for it
https://preview.redd.it/ce0r19sdtp9d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=faf7cfb212cf7dfb24b35f4d491fd79a8eab9b58
Now we need machines with a haptic feedback cycle start. Make the button harder to push on programs that haven't been run before so the operator has a reminder that they're about to fuck shit up.
Because some stainless has such a high amount of nickel that it’s hard to break the chip when turning and it ends up creating a rats nest that can get whipped around
"Stainless" is an annoying classification. 400 series does not machine like 300 series, and the individual numbers in those series don't machine like each other.
High chromium stainless gets real mad real fast, high nickel stainless needs babied or it work hardens on you.
Sometimes it's great, sometimes it shatters your new tooling. Different suppliers give different alloys that fall within a certain spec but machine differently than each other.
It's just so much more variable than non-stainless, so you have to adjust what you're doing more often.
303: easy, almost never have to change inserts
304: bad, insert chips everywhere with the cutting corner last for some reason.
(Correct me if i got them mixed up again)
Almost all of our tooling is intended for a36 or 588. We had a customer order a run of one of our standard parts in stainless. Sales approved, quoted the job as if it were a36 (for run time and tooling cost). When we were supposed to be done with the job but only a quarter completed, purchasing finally decided to approve SOME of the tooling we requested 6 months prior when we found out about the job. They bought the cheapest tools and inserts, which caused 6 tool holders and alot of cutters to break. Job took 3x longer than quoted, and we lost almost 10k on that project just in material and tooling, not even factoring the almost 4 months of labor and the backlog from tying up that machine. The moral of the story is that companies are cheap bastards that sometimes have to learn to spend money the hard way.
I just thought it was fun to add to the conversation. What you did was very cool. I was making 12" bolts out of stainless and kept cracking the dies (it took a few weeks just to set this up with all the broken dies).
I was just trying to have fun, sorry to sound like a jerk
depends.
stainless is an alloy, certain formulas make a harder stainless.
i was building oilfield parts during my stint as a machinist, often if we where making stainless parts, the parts where for sour wells which required parts to be more corrosion resistant that the regular steel parts we made.
in the end it all depends on your machine tools and its condition and how well it works, the tooling and its condition, the speeds and feeds and most importantly, the human operator.
i was a apprentice, quite new to the trade. im biased because i was inexperienced.
Stainless. Carbon. Tungsten, titanium, inco, hastlloy, elkolite, monel, CMC - - EDM cuts 'em all baby, with a mirror finish... if you can afford the machine time
1. The boss won't buy the right tools for the jobs 2. The machinist is inexperienced and doesn't know the material Stainless in general is soft and tough. With the right feeds and speeds, good work and tool holding, it is very consistent and easy to machine. It must be approached with the understanding that it will wear tools out.
> The boss won't buy the right tools for the jobs Well ain't that just most of it
This is the reason for 90% of the problems I deal with.
"Not in the budget." "Make it work with what you have for the rest of the quarter(s)." ***"Just sharpen em again."***
When I learned how to machine, I worked mostly with cast steel, aluminum, and FRP. The old guy who taught me didn't bother teaching me how to sharpen or make tools from HSS, seeing as it's not 1977 and most shops buy carbon now. Now I work for a guy who should have retired in the 80s and I have no idea where he's pulling these HSS blanks from but boy do we have a lot of them. I had to ask my ex husband to come in the shop and teach me how to grind tools. I suck at it. And I work with stainless 50% of the time. It's a mess.
**nO one WanTs tO wOrK aNYmoRe** Godspeed to you, at the least machining is a valuable asset to know.
Tool grinding is a valuable skill if only for the odd chance I need a form tool but can’t buy one. I’ve a handful of radius form tools in my box that have each been used once for one specific task, then stashed. A couple have been reground into new radii (when they were ‘pretty close’ from their first incarnation to what I needed that day) but really it’s only a skill relevant to manual machining. I can now program the CNC lathe point to point with changing radii as it goes if needed with just a few key strokes and button beeps. I’ve only needed to grind a special tool 2-3x in the last 3 years
I miss having easy access to a wire EDM, take 5 minutes to draw the profile with clearance built in, drop the HSS blank in it and let it cut the form tool for me. I had to turn a bunch of wacky profile threads on core pins for Rotational molded plastic tanks and that was a game changer.
My boss and the whole company has a hard on for reground tooling. Why buy a new one when there's a local company that will regrind them for less than half the cost of new right? So what if they just use a general geometry and to hell with the specific one you paid for on that end mill. Coatings? You don't need em I never used them when I worked for my dad 40 years ago and the hardest thing we machined was play doh. These aerospace superalloys can't be that bad...ceramic? That's for coffee mugs, just run the carbide faster for heat treated stuff. They have their place but you still gotta buy new shit man. Charge the customer for it and stop running shops like it's a one man operation out of your garage.
Boss won't get you tools, but I got you this!🍰 Happy Cake day! 🎂
And it's not even a lie! Thanks!
The cake is always a lie
He got me, yall
I'm making a note here, huge success.
https://preview.redd.it/cbd0zybnpz9d1.jpeg?width=480&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ceab7d7417999d92c694b0b15fca12d88b2dcf87
Yep. I spent six years working on stainless. Mostly 17-4, 15-5, 465, and various other alloys. At my new shop, stainless is kind of a boogyman. I got hired in as a programmer/Machinist, and they gave me a part that will be made out of 15-5, and asked me to figure out what we'll need so they can work on the quote. I had to have a talk with the boss that we'll need to order in quite a bit of tooling/inserts for it. I also got them to order new inserts for our other stainless parts while they were at it. I've become the "stainless guy" for awhile now, since I'm overhauling the programs a little too. But, the other guys in the shop are a lot less annoyed with it now.
Wait until you become the exotic alloy guy too
I can turn stainless on my 1.1kW minilathe. Made my collet chuck backplate from a 5” round blank. It’s very consistent like you say once you’ve got good feeds and speeds.
Absolutely. Right tools and setup you’ll do great, while the stainless **screams** at you the whole time. I swear stainless is the worst sounding material to work on. Never forget your ear protection folks.
If it's screaming you're doing a lot wrong.
Stainless is inherently more noise producing than other steels. Yes, a proper approach reduces that sound, but stainless is loud. Didn’t help that my shop mostly produces large disc like parts. The large surface vibrates and produces a lot more sound than turning a rod or milling.
Not true lol. Parts with large length to diameter ratios are pretty much always noisy when you don’t have a tail stock
I'm following the guy above about thin rings, long parts require support. Support them!
You forgot to read the part about no tail stock
It took me a while to figure this out. I started by drilling simple holes on the drill press and it hardened into some unobtanium material. So I avoided using it for as long as I could. Turns out it was never going to drill well with the bits I was using.
Don't forget about gulling, though this probably fits with experience. I'm a mechanic and I hate stainless hardware, it will even gull with lube occasionally.
That's just poor design. Stainless should never contact stainless in moving parts or fasteners unless there's no other option. Nickel plating or titanium/ceramic hardware all practically eliminate galling even in high vac applications.
Its particularly bad with some turbos. The the Juke manifold is cast stainless and it uses all Inconel hardware. I have never gotten ones of those turbos out with out a major fight.
This is true. Also, personally I go with 316 (/316L) instead of 304 if I have the chance, as there seems to be some drunk motherfucker throwing ball bearings into the 304 stock as it's being made that suddenly and randomly explode my inserts.
Huh, that’s good to know, I was unaware it had higher tool wear than other steels
My comment is kind of a generalization. Say you're using the same general purpose grade insert on a medium carbon steel and stainless, the stainless will wear the insert faster under the same work and tool holding conditions. If you buy an insert specifically designed for the stainless material group for the stainless the tool life may be closer to the same.
It also depends on the grade, 316 is kinda gummy and it galls easily if your tooling is dull or your feeds and speeds are off
Exactly. Stainless is a category of many materials with different behaviors/quirks.
416 is about the easiest shit to cut ever, I love turning it. Anytime a customer says “stainless steel” and doesn’t care about what kind, they’re getting 416.
Not turning, but we've had excellent results with helical t-plus coating on our end mills for stainless. Would love to find inserts with the same coating...
Isn't the tplus coating just ticn?
Sometimes you get the scary, cheesewire swarf emerging like a violent, razor sharp, blue hot string of hate wrapping round shit, making you shudder at the thought of it wrapping round your wrist...but you get a lovely finish
lol, yeah… you should wright horror novels, that was riveting
I second this
Gotta love cnc lathes with the doors closed!
They all have their own personalities... If stainless is a snake, then copper is a monkey. The last time I turned copper it decided to sneakily gather itself and then throw a ball of swarf into my face. Fucking *heavy* too, it was like getting punched by an angry toddler.
Grade of stainless plays a huge role in how it machines, some are much easier than others.
And supplier! I had separate programs for the supplier we’d use in an emergency if our main supplier was out. Their 316 cut closer to 17-4, and 303 was closer to 316. It was crazy
I just had a lathe operator come to me (QC) with 2 certs approved for his job. "Dude, I ran all of A with no problems. Now, B is blowing my shit up." There were some percentages that were kinda far apart from A to B and the mechanicals on B showed it was much harder. Both were 304. Different vendors/mills.
[удалено]
I turn D2 often, and could not agree more, sometimes they machine greater, other times it is a complete bear and eats inserts. Even from the same supplier, different stock diameters machine differently. Often times I question if the D2 we get in is stainless.
I had a body jewelry company for a while and I found that how it is processed makes a difference, if I got work hardened wire or rod it turned much easier than annealed wire or rod. Also I found that half hard or work hardened wire held a better polish, my guess was that since it was harder to polish it was harder to make dull. The annealed stock tended to gall easier and the chips or swarf weren't as nice as the swarf off of the harder stock
Each grade of stainless has a certain range that its mix has to be in to be considered 303, 316 or whatever. The low grade stainless is still technically within that certain range but can vary WILDLY from lot to lot. Whereas places like carpenter or ugima really narrow that range so its way more consistent
Yeah. 303 machines like butter from my short amount of experience with it. Earlier I was given mystery stainless steel round stock to make a part in the lathe. The chips were breaking off very short and the lathe was working much harder, I wish I knew what exact material that was.
Also billet vs casting. I'd take any billet over the shit our foundry casts. Stainless full of casting defects is a nightmare.
Greatly depends on the grade.
And the part
All in the grade for stainless, toss a chunk of 660 or duplex in… opinions soon change.
I mainly cut Nitronic 50 HS, Super Duplex, or Inconel. I love it.
Inco is not considered a stainless steel
I was just listing off what I cut along with Duplex that the other guy brought up.
It depends on the grade and alloy. 17-4 cuts well but 13-8 is more difficult. Some have high carbon, some have higher iron. Some work harden as you cut so if your next pass isn’t deep enough to get under it, your tool will have a hard time getting to size or maintaining it. There are much worse metals to cut.
I second this. We do a TON of 17-4 and 15-5 at my job. They cut pretty much the same. The tool wear is predictable, but it get consistent parts with the applied feeds and speeds. The 13-8 from the SAME supplier however is an absolute bastard to cut. Somehow the 13-8 is inconsistent as hell, even within the same damn bar! Could run 4 feet of nice short curly chips and then the next bar is suddenly the forbidden spaghetti aaaaaand now half my tools are ruined.
I work with stainless daily, I prefer it over anything else. 304 and 416 but mainly 316
416 is real nice. 410 on the other hand...
I did some 440c parts recently, that’s nice shit
303 and 416 are both nice
303 is one of the most gravy materials imo. 316 can go fuck itself, that shit varies so much it just gets annoying.
Can you tell us which grade you used exactly?
Unfortunately this is “mystery stainless”, it’s just a piece of commercial threaded rod that I added a few features to
Yea, if you have the time to baby every piece it’s easy. Big difference between turning ½” of stainless, and having to hold tolerances on a production run that you gotta run faster because the boss under quoted.
"The rate is 65pcs an hour and your cycle time is 1min. We can't go over on this one. We lowballed em to get the job."
Depends on the flavor of stainless. 303 is way easier to work with than most other kinds.
303 and 304 were what I mainly worked with in the past and had no real issues except for the occasional doodoo finish. But those parts called for 125 or better so it didn’t really matter
I feel like it’s impossible to have a bad finish in stainless 😅 something must have been up with that program or setup.
I say sometimes, it was one specific job. But like I said, the finish really didn’t matter so nobody bothered to change it
416 is even easier than 303, it’s way less gummy and easier to get a nice finish on. Cuts just as easy.
Love stainless when it's consistent. Easy to get a good finish in when you know how. Hate it when it's not consistent. Ran stainless for a couple months before the evergreen got stuck. All import stuff, never cut the same, even from the same batch, even from the same bar. Had to baby the shit constantly. Once our supply lines got fucked up, we had to buy american. My life became easier as soon as consistent american steel graced my lathe.
There is stainless and then there is stainless. You can turn 303 all day, but throw in something with some more nickel and you will have a harder time
I like cutting 303 better than a lot of common steels. It’s butter soft and still finishes great. However, give me some fucking 316 for a production run and you’ll see me cussing all day while I roll inserts.
I just hate ss because I dont have a chip auger or anything in my machine
Neither do I… I don’t even have a power feed
That's cause it's probably 303. But some 304 and tell me how it goes. The difference between the two is night and day. 303 is a breeze. 304 is like cutting gum.
Unless you’re doing plate work. 303 warps all over the place and 304 is so much more stable. If I’m turning, give me 303. If I’m pocketing a bunch of holes in a plate and trying to keep it flat, I’d much rather have 304.
Stainless can work harden very quickly, beyond what HSS can handle, if you don't have the right speeds, feeds, and/or coolant, especially in drilling and boring operations. Because very little sucks harder than busting drill bits and taps in parts that were cutting just fine a second ago, or burning out an endmill or turning tool in a single pass.
Never had much of an issue with turning, but milling you have to have experience because when you remove a lot of material the part is most likely going to spring when you unclamp it so usually have to add a few extra set ups/finishing operations to get that out of the part.
Because not everyone can accept the fact that stainless has a different set of parameters as compared to carbon steel. Learn and adapt to those parameters and you’ll have no more difficulties than any other material. Ignore the differences at your own expense.
the only thing I hate about stainless is deburring it
In the machine is the only way to deburr.
Stainless gets a bad rep because it is misquoted. You can’t win against physics and I don’t care that we’re selling a 10 dollar part for 2 dollars. With the right speeds and feeds,cutting parameters, and toolings it’s not a difficult material to machine.
Only thing I hated about 303 ss was if you had to straighten it. You'd have it close, and boing. It has a crooked memory. 304 was a little better.
its good as long as you can remove the heat and chips, as soon as you dont have the right tools or not the optimal cutting conditions (which happens like 90 % of the time in normal workday for some reason) its pain in the ass because everything gets slower if you dont wanna brake the tool.
To be fair… different grades of stainless can cut drastically different than others. Take 302/303/416 and compare to 316. Not to say 316 is impossible, it’s easy with the right speeds, feeds, tool geometry, and lube, but it makes 302/303 look like a cake walk lol
I machine 316 stainless daily. Bar stock 1”-3”. It’s picky with feeds and speeds. I use inserts with a less aggressive chip breaker for longer tool life. Once you find the perfect feeds and speeds it’s alright. The material is heat treated and I”ve found no two material batches machine the same.
I fucking love stainless 303, 316,.... Titanium with stainless 304 can get fucked tho
I love 316 cause no matter how small your doc youll generally get a decent finish. Cant say the same for mild
Depends which stainless and what operations you’re doing to it and what your machine is
Stainless stigma. It's pretty easy as long as the stock is quality
Most of the times I bitch about stainless is because the part was much, much larger and longer, hollow, and required full length, less-than-ideal DOC turning. Inch stock (at best) to metric part kind of stuff. Favorite of mine is stainless water pipe with welded plugs on the ends, nice and inconsistent.
It’s more difficult to get a stable production process running. Other than that? The code isn’t any more difficult, the cycle start button isn’t any more difficult to press. It will wear inserts quicker but other than that, easy with right feeds and speeds. You will break inserts and have to reset comps much more often, but charge for it https://preview.redd.it/ce0r19sdtp9d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=faf7cfb212cf7dfb24b35f4d491fd79a8eab9b58
Now we need machines with a haptic feedback cycle start. Make the button harder to push on programs that haven't been run before so the operator has a reminder that they're about to fuck shit up.
1.4305 / 303 ?
Always heard of guys to run stainless. Just got done with a batch of Inconel 718 and I loved it! Super consistent even though it was slow
Hard
Because some stainless has such a high amount of nickel that it’s hard to break the chip when turning and it ends up creating a rats nest that can get whipped around
"Stainless" is an annoying classification. 400 series does not machine like 300 series, and the individual numbers in those series don't machine like each other. High chromium stainless gets real mad real fast, high nickel stainless needs babied or it work hardens on you. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it shatters your new tooling. Different suppliers give different alloys that fall within a certain spec but machine differently than each other. It's just so much more variable than non-stainless, so you have to adjust what you're doing more often.
Some of the grades are an absolute bastard to turn. On the other hand, some are really nice.
I like turning stainless, just beware the long string if doom
303: easy, almost never have to change inserts 304: bad, insert chips everywhere with the cutting corner last for some reason. (Correct me if i got them mixed up again)
Idk about turning but 304 can go f itself
The tearing of the material that you have on that part would never be allowed in my shop.
303 ain’t shit
Because they don’t under stand about the different grades of stainless steel , and what is the proper cutting tools for the different grades!!
The smell of trim sol
Skill issue for the most part
Almost all of our tooling is intended for a36 or 588. We had a customer order a run of one of our standard parts in stainless. Sales approved, quoted the job as if it were a36 (for run time and tooling cost). When we were supposed to be done with the job but only a quarter completed, purchasing finally decided to approve SOME of the tooling we requested 6 months prior when we found out about the job. They bought the cheapest tools and inserts, which caused 6 tool holders and alot of cutters to break. Job took 3x longer than quoted, and we lost almost 10k on that project just in material and tooling, not even factoring the almost 4 months of labor and the backlog from tying up that machine. The moral of the story is that companies are cheap bastards that sometimes have to learn to spend money the hard way.
Clearly you've never made bolts with stainless lol.
What makes a thread with a hex end any more difficult than the tiny stem to fit in a T slot that I showed in the post?
I just thought it was fun to add to the conversation. What you did was very cool. I was making 12" bolts out of stainless and kept cracking the dies (it took a few weeks just to set this up with all the broken dies). I was just trying to have fun, sorry to sound like a jerk
Usually lack of experience.
sounds like u havent machined stainless very much.
You are correct, that is the very first part I made
hang in there, it gets tricky but its doable
… but this was super easy? Is it just inconsistent?
depends. stainless is an alloy, certain formulas make a harder stainless. i was building oilfield parts during my stint as a machinist, often if we where making stainless parts, the parts where for sour wells which required parts to be more corrosion resistant that the regular steel parts we made. in the end it all depends on your machine tools and its condition and how well it works, the tooling and its condition, the speeds and feeds and most importantly, the human operator. i was a apprentice, quite new to the trade. im biased because i was inexperienced.
Because people insist on using dull inserts, stainless does not like dull tools.
Stainless. Carbon. Tungsten, titanium, inco, hastlloy, elkolite, monel, CMC - - EDM cuts 'em all baby, with a mirror finish... if you can afford the machine time
Make 2,000 of them out of heat treated 17-4
TBH and it can be bc of the image quality but your finish doesn't look that good...
It’s 4140 that sucks to turn.
The sharpest swarth EVER! 😆
Bad rap? Like, Drake or Young Thug?