Metal Lathe Tutorial 13 : How To Pick Metal

hello Internet my name is Quinn and this is bloody axe this is lathe skills a series of quick videos on getting started in machining this is episode 13 buying materials if you like this content please consider subscribing on patreon there's a link down there in the description ok let's dive in so you've watched all these YouTube videos on machining and you've bought yourself your first lathe and you're super excited to dive into this new hobby of machining and at some point disturbingly late in that process you realize you need materials and you think to yourself self how do you buy metal where do you buy metal what kinds of metal are there I've never done the any of this before well that's what we're going to talk about today you know it sounds silly but this is one of those things that I think a lot of experts don't realize that beginners don't know is how to buy metal and what kinds you should get so let's talk about that right now so you set out to buy steel you think well I'll just go onto one of those online metal merchants that I've seen and oh my god what have I gotten into what are all these yeah turns out there are a million kinds of steel for a million different applications but the good news is as a hobbyist machinist there's only a couple you really need to know about so for our purposes we'll break steel down into three different categories cold rolled hot rolled and mystery for machining purposes cold rolled is generally your friend hot rolled steel you can always tell it has this characteristic crusty orange peel scale on it this is mill scale and it's a byproduct of the manufacturing process of this this stuff is great for you know construction and fabrication types of things that's great for welding but for for machining purposes cold-rolled is generally a little more pleasant to work with now within cold rolled there are also many many types of categories carbon levels alloys etc but I think the hobbyist really only needs to worry about two the first is your basic mild steel which is ten eighteen and this stuff is very plentiful you can find it anywhere it's a it takes a little more experience to machine it well but it can be welded also which is very nice so for mixed you know medium projects it's great it's inexpensive ubiquitous if you're doing strictly machining the is 12 l 14 steel sometimes they call it lead LOI or has other trade names but it has a very small amount of lead in it that makes it machine very very nicely so I think this stuff is really really great especially when you're learning this stuff is very forgiving it's easy to get good surface finishes with it and it's going to build your confidence so I definitely recommend if you're going to get into steel starting with 12 L 14 the only real disadvantage of this stuff is that it's very difficult to weld it any any time they put additives and steel to make it easier to machine those impurities inevitably make it harder to weld so but for machining parts this stuff is great and lastly I want to call out mr. e steel because you're gonna find this stuff everywhere I think this is a chunk I found in my garden and it's going to be very tempting when you first get started in machining to grab this stuff anywhere you find it and you know use it for projects the problem is you have no idea what this stuff is the grade of it the carbon level the impurities are additives it might be in it all of that affects how well it machines and what your speeds and feeds should be and all that so yeah this kind of mystery steel of unknown origin is going to be of pretty limited use and especially as a beginner I would avoid this stuff because it's adding a whole category of variables to trying to get better at machining you know if you buy from from the store fresh 12 L 14 steel you know what you've got and that's you know variable one variable eliminate it so now you can just focus on you know acquiring the other skills that you need so as tempting as free mystery metal is I would avoid it and to that end you know keep your scraps and your spares categorized so that you know what they are it can be hard to tell by looking if one is 12 or 14 and once an 18 and whatever so I you know keep your scrap box sorted the second very common hobbyist choice is aluminum and like steel the stuff comes in million flavors the good news is though that aluminum is pretty simple for the hobbyist really 6061 the basic aluminum is really all you have to care about the stuff machines great and you know it's easy to get good results with it's cheap easy to get comes in all sorts of dimensions so with aluminum 6061 the only real downside to this stuff is while it Mills really great on the lay that's very hard to get chips to break so you tend to tend to end up with long rats nests on the lathe and even experienced machinists will struggle with that a little bit but that's just something you live with with aluminum on the lathe another great option for getting started for hobbyists as brass brass is very forgiving to machine and the tool geometry used with it is very simple so it's easy to grind tools for brass so I think it's a really great choice no brass comes in also many flavors just like the other metals but really the only one you need to know about is 360 free machining brass sometimes it's called C 3600 or whatever but it's always three six and some zeros but yeah 360 free machining brass is a really strong choice it's it's a little bit more expensive than some of the other materials but I think it's very very pleasant to work with and really worth your time it's also easy to get in loss shapes so this is hex bar and this is really convenient if you're making fasteners or plumbing fittings things like that to already have that hex form right in there for ya now back here behind the brass we have bronze and this is also sometimes called red brass once again it comes in a million alloys but for hobbyists I think the only one you really need to worry about is 932 sometimes called bearing bronze and this is this stuff's pretty pretty exotic as hobbyist materials go and it's expensive you can tell bronze because it has this kind of purple striped appearance to it but the main thing you're going to use this for is like bearings bushings you know spinning shafts things like that that need a oiled surface to run in it's used a lot in hobby steam work so it's also a great choice for boiler bushings valves things that are going to be in contact with hot steam because it doesn't suffer from these Inka fication like brass does brass can get brittle with prolonged contact with steam because it can lose the zinc an interesting thing about bronze is because it is so commonly used for bearings and bushings and because it's expensive you can often find it in hollow round bar you know all metals you pay for by the atom so if there's no point paying for atoms that you're just going to throw under the chip tray so by buying hollow stalk your you're minimizing the amount of machining that you need to do and the amount of material that you're paying for one last pro tip with bronze again because it's expensive don't pay for any items that you don't need often the cheapest way to get bronze stock is the plumbing aisle at the hardware store you can buy you know if you can buy a fitting like this that is larger than the part that you're trying to make if you can machine away anything that isn't necessary here and get to a part inside there that you need this stuff is actually quite cheap and it's usually pretty decent quality bronze usually the castings are really terrible as you can see on this guy this is you know very inexpensive sand casting but once you machine it down it doesn't matter so think about the plumbing aisle if you need bronze now speaking of steam engines if you're into that type of hobby you're going to encounter cast iron a lot it's typically found in casting kits and it's not something you typically buy as bar stock so often in fact the only sample of it I could find was this broken half nut from my lathe but yeah if you're doing those types of models you're going to encounter a cast iron is great to machine various types of cast iron as well but there's you know there's ductile and gray and different types but it's not something that if you're just working with bar stock you're going to be likely to encounter and if you're making a model kit the cast iron is supplied so you don't really have to worry about the types of it or how to buy it so much okay getting a little more exotic now this is copper and most people's casual experience with copper is just going to be through you know water pipe you buy the hardware store but you can actually buy copper in any dimension bar stock that you might need just like any other material so the catch with copper is that is crazy expensive you ever wondered why people break into houses to rip the wiring out of the walls it's this stuff is super super expensive so I don't work with it a lot both because of the cost and because it actually is quite challenging to machine it's very soft and gummy like aluminum but it doesn't have a lot of structure to it so it can't it doesn't break chips and it doesn't it doesn't machine very well but you can do it and if you're into model making and steam engines again you're going to be working with the stuff a lot for boilers and such but yeah copper is another option and of course we would be remiss if we didn't talk about tool steel this is probably the most exotic steel that the hobbyist is to encounter you're most likely going to encounter in the form of drill rod which are these precision ground pieces of round bar and what's great about this stuff is that it's it's precisely dimensioned so if you buy quarter inch drill rod for example it's either going to be exactly two hundred and fifty thousand diameter or it may be two fifty one or two forty nine depending on the brand some of its intentionally one that wonder but yeah drill rod is nice because it's precisely dimension you can use it directly for you know making alignment pins or shafts or things like that tool steel of course can be bought in any form as well not just drill rod you can buy it in bar stock and plenty of other forms this stuff is quite a bit more expensive than normal steel it's also harder to come by so for example my local steel supplier doesn't carry tool steel because it's not used in construction or you know fabrication where you know most of the steel market is so if I want to buy this stuff locally I have to go quite far afield to a specialty tool steel supplier so this stuff I buy online now one of the one of the main you know hazel and echoes of tool steel is that it can be heat treated so this is a slug of tool steel that has been hardened and then tempered with a torch so I'll talk about heat treating in another video but know that tool steel can be hardened and tempered and that's why it's useful for making tools so well tool steels superpower is that it can be heat treated it's also actually just really tough on its own so it's still useful without heat treating for shafts and things where you need some extra strength and because of that it can be a little bit challenging to machine on smaller hobbyist machines so you're going to need to minimize tool pressure and make sure your rigidity is really really on fleek there in the last fun material I want to talk about our machining plastics again there are a million kinds of these but if you have to pick one to know about I'd go with Delrin this is also called acetyl Deloraine is a trade name for it and it's a plastic design for machining it's it's very strong and stable and machines very well it does make long stringy chips on the lathe but other than that it machines really nicely and this stuff is great for making oil free bearings or if you need quiet rollers for machinery things like that this stuff has all sorts of uses so don't forget about plastics and my go-to is Delrin and this stuff's easy to buy as well a quick mention of a couple materials that I didn't have on hand to demonstrate that you might be interested in the first is stainless stainless steel is a bit of a dark art machining wise and you'll find lots and lots of disagreement online about which ones are best but the general consensus seems to be that 303 or 316 stainless are the easiest to machine so whichever one of those you can most easily get your hands on I would go with that and lastly is chromoly steel there are varying degrees of that but to the most common you'll find is 41 40 and that's great when you need something really strong like you're making bolts for you know automotive applications or you know shafts for machines things like that that need to be very strong and something else you might encounter it's called stress proof steel which is a trade name for a grade of steel called 1144 and this is a type of cold rolled steel that's treated to relieve the internal stresses in the material and what that does is make it less prone to warping and also stronger so it's commonly used in gear shafts opinions piston rods you know things like that where you need a little more strength it's also very free machining and it's nice stuff to work with okay so let's talk about how to actually buy materials the first place I always recommend people look is locally you might be surprised what material suppliers are around you if you've never checked and of course the nice thing about buying locally is that you get it immediately and you can see what you're getting you've got a real human you can talk to can make recommendations downside might be that often these places want to sell you a lot of materials so the minimum order might be 10 or 20 feet of round bar or something which might be far more than you need but they will also often deliver and they will often make cuts for you for for inexpensive or free so definitely check what's around you and the other nice thing about these places is that they often have on offcuts area which can be a goldmine of random little bits of stuff and you know these these are a crapshoot sometimes there's amazing stuff sometimes there's nothing but yeah any good suppliers can have an off and that might be your first stop and hey real talk here for a second these places can be intimidating they're you know it's probably in an industrial part of town that you never have been to and you know you're gonna walk into a very serious-looking building that has very serious-looking people and if you want to talk very seriously about serious steel and you're just a hobbyist who wants to buy a little bit of round bar to play or play with on the lathe but you know if you if you know what you need you want twelve or fourteen or ten eighteen or whatever just walk up to the counter and ask for it and they'll help you out and if they're not friendly to you because you're a hobbyist and you're not building a skyscraper then just go somewhere else there's plenty of other places to go now if you don't have something locally or if the material you want isn't there then the next stop but for me is always eBay and I think this surprises people because they assume that the shipping would be cost prohibitive on metal but in fact at least in the United States the USPS flat-rate shipping boxes have completely transformed online metal sales and you know you go on eBay and for example this is a simple search for for brass round bar and you can find all sorts of different sizes and little packages of dimensions and lengths lots of good stuff in fact I'll call out stoner tools and raw materials here hashtag not sponsored he's my go-to for lots and lots of stuff he's great shipping is fast and free and this is just perfect for hobbyists because you just need a little bit of something and maybe a weird dimension and you don't want to buy 20 feet of it this is this is my go-to now if you can't find what you need on eBay the next good option online is places like online metals or metal supermarkets hashtag not sponsored they are going to have a much better selection of course it's going to be a little more expensive but you know when you when you need something more exotic stainless or copper or plastics you know these guys are definitely going to have it and they're also going to deal in short lengths these places also often have kind of a virtual offcuts area you can buy packages of like random lengths of materials and it'll be cheaper so those are a great option and one more place I think people don't often think of for material is mcmaster-carr you know we all go here for our pulleys and our fasteners and whatever but they have a great selection of unusual materials as well and they offer short lengths so if you need a foot of cast iron you know square bar mcmaster-carr can hook you up and now they also have some of the more unusual machining plastics and lots of other cool stuff so don't forget about mcmaster-carr hashtag not sponsored that's it for how to buy metals I hope found this useful and we'll see you next time thanks for watching you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 58,160

Rating: 4.9735866 out of 5

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, jewlery making, diy, home improvement, resin casting

Id: yBVo8wufsCE

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2019