I Make the Simple Impossible
April 3rd, 2009Can’t Buy What You Can’t Find
I think the last thing I need to make a lathe work is a set of turning tools. Og recommended starting with indexable carbide tools.
I went to Enco, and they have like 3 million varieties. Right-handed, left-handed, AL, BR, BL, AR, E…I don’t even know what these terms MEAN.
Jim Dunmyer suggests I grind my own tools. Great! Let’s see how many types of blanks Enco sells.
Ah, this is less confusing. I can’t FIND them. So…ZERO. For the time being.
Maybe I can just wedge a paring knife into the toolpost. I could at least use the lathe for making ornamental fruit-rind spirals.
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:58 PM
buy the little set I pointed you to. and learn from there. there are more types than you can imagine. look at a catalog from Kennametal, Sandvik, Komet, and Iscar.
grinding your own tools is a pain.
April 3rd, 2009 at 5:30 PM
p. 166 in the 2009 catalog. Buy the 3/8 square High Speed Steel M-2 tool bits. $1.80 apiece. Each one will last you years. Grinding is easy. You only have to be close. If you get a copy of Frank Marlowe’s “Machine Shop Essentials”, you will be 2/3 of the way to the answers to most of your questions you ask on your blog. In an appendix he has a picture of a generic HSS bit, and a table of the appropriate angles to grind for turning various metals. You need a grinder, of course. Another, simpler, approach is to buy brazed carbide tool bits. That is a fast start. They work fine on aluminum, but give a poor surface finish on low carbon steel. Carbide needs to run fast, and likes a healthy cut, which may be a challenge on the Clausing you want to buy. The inserts that Og recommends are great if you know which one to buy and when to use it. And if you are running production. Nobody in production uses HSS anymore. The nice thing about HSS is that you can get nice surface finish on stuff that is a challenge on some of the brazed carbide bits, and they last forever. They are well suited for smaller lathes. Resharpening is trivial. You will also learn why tool bits cut if you experiment a little. They are also a lot cheaper.
And I do have lots of carbide inserts and tool holders. What I find most useful are insert parting off tools and grooving tools.
Bill P
April 4th, 2009 at 1:29 AM
can’t you just mount a Workmate on the “ways” and clamp a Henckel Knife in it’s massive wooden jaws and be done with it?
April 4th, 2009 at 2:18 PM
Like Bill says.
April 4th, 2009 at 3:46 PM
I’m with Bill. Almost any machining book will show you how to grind tool bits, and as Bill says, the angles have to be only approximate. Except for threading, and even that is easy to grind for. You’ll get a better finish than with Carbide, and the bits are CHEAP. Also, you can probably clamp them right in the tool holder, so no special stuff required.
April 4th, 2009 at 7:33 PM
You can clamp carbide holders in the tool holder, there are hundreds of varieties of carbide, the right grade of carbide will always cut better than high speed steel for practical purposes, and a set that has angles covering everything a home shop machinist could possibly need is about twenty bucks. it’s a no brainer. Learn a lost art that was lost because it was replaced by something far superior and cheaper, or go with the superior, cheaper.