what cutting tools

[lee steablerParticipant @leesteabler62809]

hi i am wanting to purchase a set of lathe cutting tools to start turning some metal but unsure what I should get as a minimum to start. I have seen sets on amazon for 7 pieces for about £28 which is reasonable but I don’t mind paying a bit more for good tools or is it better to risk poor cheap tools when learning as they may get damaged. is there a good standard make of tools that experienced machinists swear by. thanks Lee

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Weytoll-Holder-Turning-Carbide-Inserts/dp/B09BQ5LZ2W/ref=sw_ttl_d_sspa_dk_huc_pt_expsub_5?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B09BQ5LZ2W&pd_rd_w=deXfC&content-id=amzn1.sym.323c8a4a-2075-43ec-a184-cbbcedbf9854&pf_rd_p=323c8a4a-2075-43ec-a184-cbbcedbf9854&pf_rd_r=2AAMMJHN9J33J0SQJTYZ&pd_rd_wg=4wSX2&pd_rd_r=798b3436-9ec7-479f-a423-e4ad799bb25e&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9odWNfbXJhaQ==

 

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Your first mistake is the word ‘set’. Forget sets. Always half not needed, or not ideal. They are often a variety of cheese optimisticly called carbide on ebay.

Better to look on ebay for a ‘job lot’ of old 1/4 or at most 3/8 bits that are not too short. You want ones that are about 1 1/2″ long minimum so you have something to clamp and only pay <£1 each. Some will already be a usable shape, or can be more quickly trued up than a new square piece that has to have a lot ground off.

After you have done some turning in a month or so you can look for a single round ended carbide tool for getting under the skin of cast iron. In all other respects carbide tools don’t do beginners any favours.

Also yu do NOT need the absolute biggest toolbits you can squeeze into the lathe toolpost. Your girlfriend is never going to see it so won’t be impressed. Learn about ‘packing’.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

More to the point, too large a tool is not easy, or is too high anyway, to be set to centre-height.

Many people have made height-setting gauges to suit their own lathes, and it’s a worthwhile practice project with a valuable result.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Whilst I agree with Bazyle that sets are not the way to go, I’m not sure that used HSS from Ebay is a better option for those starting out, either..

Not every one has a grinder or even somewhere to use one.

If you buy carbide tool holders from a tool supplier, you’ll be more likely to buy a ‘recognised’ form that takes a ‘standard’ insert which will make re-ordering easier, and allow you to select alternative specifications of the same insert to suit different materials and cutting conditions.

Because turning essentially comprises only a couple of basic cutting actions, you don’t really need many different types of tool just to get started.

Here is a well-known supplier’s page of lathe cutting tools – at first glance the choice looks pretty sparse, but the tools here will cover about 90% of turning jobs, and use a limited number of standard insert types.

https://www.arceurotrade.co.uk/Catalogue/Cutting-Tools/Lathe-Turning-Tools-Indexable/ARC-Indexable-Turning-Tools

For most of my own day to day turning and facing I mostly use a ‘SCLC-R’ holder to take ‘CCMT’ or ‘CCGT’ shape inserts. A 10mm tool holder will most probably take ’06—-‘ inserts (6mm size).

For steel and cast iron ‘CCMT 060204’ inserts are tough and provide a good finish and I’d recommend these for practice if you are just starting out.

CCGT inserts are sharper and are designed for aluminium (but work well on steel), but not so tough and easier to chip.

Best ways to chip an insert are to run the edge of the insert into stationary work, and to rotate the work ‘backwards’ against the edge..

These a few basic thoughts, it’s a huge subject.. HTH

 

 

 

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Agree with Diogenes, a SCLC-R holder and the two types of insert will do for 90% of your likely turning needs. Add additional holders as and when you have the need.What lathe do you have as that will to some extent limit the size of holders you can fit.

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Agreed, CCGT tips will do 90% of turning jobs but for the other 10% you will soon find you need some lengths of HSS  and a bench grinder to make specials.

Russell

[Andy_GParticipant @andy_g]

While I agree with the general sentiment against ‘sets’ of lathe tools, I bought the following set and have found them to be excellent value:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07GWLTJ12

This set includes a boring bar and a threading tool.

The inserts included are OK, but plan on getting some better ones (**GT) from a reliable supplier.

 

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Of that 10% I’d say you don’t need HSS to cover it all. Blade type insert parting tool, Boring bar(s) that thak the same CC*T inserts, partial form threading tools will likely cover 9% which leaves 1% for HSS specials.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Experienced machinists avoid sets because they already know what tools they need/  Beginners don’t!  I started out not knowing exactly what I wanted to do or what cutters were needed to do it!   After some research, I bought a set of HSS knives like this from ArcEuro, who also sell them individually:

Of these, the Right Hand knife will get most use, but they all will see action eventually.  All needed immediately if you start by learning all the basic machine operations on test pieces: turning, chamfering, external threading, boring, internal threading, and parting-off.

HSS versus Carbide inserts is another debate.   HSS has many virtues, but it has to be resharpened.  Sharpening requires a £grinding wheel and skill. Some have natural grinding talent, others struggle to get good results even after a lot of practice.  Beware well-meant advice assuming grinding HSS is easy!   Chaps good at grinding HSS have trouble grasping that others, including me, might be clumsy and have a poor eye.

Carbide inserts are pre-shaped, usually last longer than HSS, and are changed, not resharpened.   Inserts have largely replaced HSS for production work because no cutting time is wasted resharpening and re-setting tools.  No skill needed! On the downside, carbide is fussier than HSS in that speed, depth of cut, and feed-rate may all need to be tuned in to the job for best results.  Not a problem for industry who have all the data and powerful rigid machines, but hobbyists often turn unknown metal on a relatively lightly built lathe.  Inserts also come in bewildering variety, and the catalogues assume the buyer is experienced, has selected the insert by feeding known requirements into an application, or has paid for specialist advice.

Fortunately, a fairly small range of inserts cover most hobby requirements.  The range sold by ArcEuro is suitable.  One trick for slow lightly built lathe owners: although the lathe may not be fast, powerful, or rigid enough to get the best out of inserts made for steel, the  sharp uncoated inserts sold for Non-Ferrous metal happen to work well on steel at hobby cutting rates.

The answer to HSS vs Carbide depends on what the lathe is used for.   If the work involves special shapes cut with form tools, then HSS is essential.   I do general experimental work, and find the convenience and performance of carbide works best for me.  About 90% of my turning is done with carbide inserts.  I switch to HSS on special occasions – form tools, and when carbide fails to get a good finish.

One type I can’t recommend are the painted brazed carbide sets:

Issue is they often arrive unsharpened and need a green grinding wheel.   They must be useful for something, but for my purposes they combine the disadvantages of HSS and carbide!

Dave

[Phil SParticipant @phils66830]

PM sent

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

The ideal cutting tool might well depend upon the machine.

An OLD machine, (60 years or more) may not get the best out of carbide .

Carbide works best on a machine that is rigid, capable of higher speeds and can remove metal fast.

(I seem able to chip brazed carbides very easily, anyway, so use carbide tips as well as HSS on a 2003 machine.)

Older machines , particularly for hobby use, were intended to use HSS tools, although carbide will function.

If you want to grind your own tools, for a particular form, or special purpose, you will be using HSS anyway, sinc grinding carbide, unless you have a diamond wheel, is not possible on a normal bench grinder with carborundum wheels.

Buying a “set” of tools will probably mean that some are never, or very rarely, used.

Displaying even more bias, a lot of my turning is done using a Tangential tool, which uses a HSS toolbit.

(You can buy from Eccentric Engineering) or make your own, (Necessary if you want to use smaller toolbits.  At least two designs for 1/8″ toolbits have been published in MEW )

I use a Carbide tip for roughing, but that produces a good finish most of the time, and will deal with hardened steel, where HSS suffers!

Grinding your own HSS tools will teach you a lot about cutting tools.

Howard

 

 

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I use both, often depending on material and purpose; but having started to use carbide inserts as The Thing To Do, now use HSS more, on both my Myford and Harrison lathes. I use inserts for thread-cutting though.

The latter lathe, an L5, is a big hefty thing on which an insert tool ought remove a fair amount of steel rapidly, but it has no coolant system and I prefer to run it more gently. In fact I don’t find a great difference in finish between the two types of tool by speed, but much more by material, but anyway it is often easier to gain a better finish with HSS.

.

Steel tools have the advantage of price over inserts! Inserts are about £5 each, typically, and each single-use edge does not last long. Their trade catalogues reveal a bewildering range and very short lives, admittedly in industrial use on machines with very fine control, and capable of excavating the oddest of alloys at terrifying rates. There, they win on price by their reliability, work rate and repeatability.

Our suppliers – I buy from JB Cutting Tools – offer selections to give us the best results on our more modest machine-tools with fairly “ordinary” metals, more sedate speeds and a mix of self-acting and hand feeding.

If you do intend using carbide indexable tooling extensively it is a good idea to keep an explanation of the umpteen-CHR$ designation system for inserts and holders.

Leading from which, unless you buy full sets of 10 at a time the stockist might pack them in boxes still labelled with their original, different contents. This likely due to we more impecunious types buying smaller numbers at the exhibitions, leaving the seller with irregularly-emptied trade boxes! (Sorry, Mrs. Beatty.)

.

Is grinding an HSS tool especially difficult, as implied above?

Of course it demands practice and knowing basic tool geometry, but needs only an ordinary grey-grit bench-grinder. The apology for a tool-rest on most of them is the biggest obstacle to decent results, but it is not too difficult to make a larger, adjustable replacement that can be set to the appropriate angles to the wheel by using simple sheet-metal gauges. See for example Harold Hall’s book on the subject.

The angles are not super-critical, either. Within a degree or so is usually fine (except when profiling a tool for screw-cutting or similar.)

If you grind a tool from an HSS blank it may be worth rough-cutting the bulk off with an angle-grinder to save wear on the bench-grinder wheel.

Note that the side of a grinding-wheel should not be used. The slightly concave face naturally imparted by the wheel rim is rarely if ever of any consequence, and hardly noticeable anyway.

Honing the ground cutting edge with a hand-held slip-stone can help give finer finishes or touch up one just starting to blunt, but it takes a steadier hand and better eyes than mine to avoid inadvertently blunting the edge in doing so.

 

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I’ve not had problems grinding carbide on a bench grinder with green grit wheel so no need for diamonds. That is shaping new tools from broken carbide milling cutter shanks or grinding brazed tip tools.

On the Subject of Brazed tools although some here may not get on with them the Minnie in my Avitar was mostly turned using 1/4″ sq shank brazed carbide tools so maybe they are not as bad as some would have you think.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Tangential turning tool is dead easy to sharpen, even starting from a blank. I use mine a lot

[VicParticipant @vic]

Yes agreed, cheap to run and easy to set to centre height. I’ve made several of my own but you can buy them.

https://www.eccentricengineering.com.au/products/diamond-tool-holder/the-diamond-tool-holder
You can of course load them with a carbide cutter for cutting hard stuff as well – if you have a way of grinding it.

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Oh dear. If you can’t swim do you demand that all swimming pools be drained? Why why why do people try to perpetuate the idea that grinding HSS is in any way difficult. Falling off a log is more difficult because you have to climb up on the log to start with.
Grinders are cheap – often available from estate sales for a tenner. You can make an adequate rest from blocks of wood as I and others have explained in previous threads the higher you go up a curved wheel the more of an angle it creates. Easy.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Lee’s original request (as I read it) was concerning the suitability of, or an alternative source for, ready-made tooling for a first introduction to turning metal with a new lathe.

I think in that circumstance, a canny choice of tools based around a couple of common inserts that are cheap and widely available, and yet also available in some very sophisticated specifications, will ensure they remain much-used items of tooling for years to come and represent the best value for money.

I quite agree that obtaining the equipment & learning to make one’s own tooling is a useful and probably even essential capability if one wants to explore the hobby seriously, but for the particular case in point, I don’t believe it to be essential – it can wait ’til later.

 

 

 

 

[Robert Atkinson 2Participant @robertatkinson2]

I find it interesting that nobody asked what lathe Lee has or the materials he is working with…

I’m not really qualified to offer advice on this but in general agree with Diogenes, JasonB and SOd’s comments.

Robert.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Jason asked in his first post I think..

[lee steablerParticipant @leesteabler62809]

hi all

ive read all your advice and thank you all for taking the time to reply to me and I have bought a set of indexable tool holders from Phil and these will at least get me started.

Just a little bit about where I am on my journey. I built a workshop a few years ago for tinkering in but it ended up a dumping ground for all my construction tools and all the crap one accumulates through life but cannot chuck away in case it ( but never does) comes in, anyway I decided the first tool i wanted was a lathe and work my fitting out of my workshop around that, this has sat idle since last year and in bits as i had to dismantle it to transport it as it is a boxford lathe which a friend told me was a decent lathe but it was so bloody heavy. my lathe is now ready but now need to turn some metal ( also where do I get some ? best places) and gets some practice so will be asking for further help in what I could make as I never had a target of what i wanted. im thinking my next tools will prob be a bench grinder and then a pillar drill but think a milling machine will be very expensive and think that the learning curve on those will be quite steep or is that that not the case. anyway thanks again

Lee

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

To practice, I’d start with ‘Bright Mild Steel’ – comes in ’rounds’, square’, ‘flat’, etc.

The most easily machined and commonest is ‘EN1a’, also called ‘230M07’ – rounds and squares can have a little added lead (Pb) to make them even easier to machine.

It’s a staple material for most hobby projects.

Aluminium, ‘6061’ or ‘6082’ will be fine, and Brass use ‘CZ121’ – most hobby suppliers stock suitable grades in any case..

Prices fluctuate a bit, and it can be worth shopping around but for easiness I have found the following suppliers reasonably priced & reliable – beware and compare postage charges!

https://maccmodels.co.uk/product-category/materials/steel-sections/

https://www.chronos.ltd.uk/product-category/round-square-tube-sheet-metal-ptfe-nylon/metal-bar/

https://www.ekpsupplies.com/materials-metals.html

There are other sources and suppliers that may be handier to you, and/or cheaper, but if you just want something off the shelf and onto your doormat quickly, one of these will do..

 

[noel shelleyParticipant @noelshelley55608]

Hi Lee, A small local engineering works and their scrap bin is a good sorce of materials to get started. tell them your a model or hobby engineer, make an offer of funds for the tea box etc. Let them know you have just bought a lathe . Get and read the workshop practice book No 34 Lathe work, a complete course. If you have trouble working a particlar bit of metal try another. Mild steel is fine but lead bearing material should not be welded. All the above specs are fine in an ideal world but nobody lives there ! Theoretical perfection is fine and in a production world it saves time but for us if the cutter is sharp the precise angles matter little, centre height IS important ! Be wary of stainless to start with and it’s work hardening . Your next machine should be a  bench grinder and for tipped or carbide tooling a green wheel. A bench or pillar drill after that.. Some of us have grown up in engineering where high quality was essential in tooling at often high cost, for a man in a shed it is less important. I was impressed with tipped or carbide tooling to start with but it was costly and always went blunt when you had no spares, slowly I went back to HSS, far cheaper, good for most work but more important, in a minute or two I could regrind or reshape and be cutting again, by eye ! Good Luck Noel.

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

As Noel says, a HSS toolbit costs about the same as one replaceable carbide tip, but can be reground many times, to sharpen it.

AND HSS tends not chip if you manage to bang it into something.

Bias?

I use a HSS toolbit in my Eccentric Engineering Tangential Turning tool, and others for front and back chanfering, as well as parting off. (My parting blade was second hand when it came with the ML7 , probably 30 years ago, and still not worn out.  It took four years to regrind the original tangential toolbit to the point where it was no longer useable).

For roughing and boring I use replaceable Carbide tips, as well as HSS, for screwcutting.

Carbide will cut hardened steel that would make short work of HSS.

Horses for courses

Howard

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