Metal Lathe Tutorial 2 : Tool Bits

hello Internet my name is Quinn and this is blondie hacks this is late skills number two tool bits this is a series of quick videos on how to get started in machining if you like this content subscribe to me on patreon there's a link in the description I post exclusive project videos there on a regular basis alright let's dive in the job of the tool bit is to do the actual material removal because lathes are single point cutting tools only the very point of the tool bit is actually doing the work and tool bits are going to be held in a tool holder of some sort and then attached to the tool post so the most common type of tool bits that you'll encounter in the home and hobbyist shop is high speed steel high speed steel is a great place to start because it's very forgiving it's very easy to work with and it's a good fit for home and benchtop machines that are going to be smaller have lower horsepower you do need to grind high speed steel into the shape that you need for the type of cutting operation that you're doing there's a learning curve with that but you can skip past that when you're first getting started by buying pre-ground sets this is a three-eighths ground set from grizzly there's also a quarter inch set you could buy from a little machine shop and this is a very forgiving way to get started high speed steel is also good for interrupted cuts it's a little more flexible than other types of tool bits so if you're doing things like turning down hex bar or dealing with key slots that sort of thing it's a very good choice now this is carbide insert tooling which you'll see a lot in professional shops and on people with big machines it's good for production because the inserts are can be rotated and you can you know use different types of tool bits they're quick to replace carbide is difficult to use at home because it has minimum speeds and minimum feeds to get good results and that means your machine has to have high horsepower and high rigidity which is good for production but a lot of home machinists aren't going to have big enough equipment to really make good use of carbide carbide inserts are also very expensive high speed steel is very inexpensive these days there's also a third option called brazed carbide which you'll see a for sale online it's literally a random chunk of carbide that's been braised onto a shank as a way to inexpensively get access to carbide which can be useful if you need to cut something very tough carbide is extremely tough but it's also brittle so it's not as good for interrupted cuts what you'll also see in carbide are these kind of high-tech profiles cut into the tops of them these are chip breakers and because carbide can be molded into fancy shapes they can do clever things like this which are again good for production now with high speed steel you can do some amount of that you can see this tool here for example has had a chip breaker ground into it as well you can see that in these tools as well so you can do some of those tricks with high speed steel as well and the last tool I'll show you here is this boring bar just to demonstrate that you can also get high speed steel insert tooling this is a high speed steel insert and this is a great choice for hobbyists especially for something like a boring bar where the insert is really a convenient way to to do this kind of tooling and but still giving you that nice forgiving performance of high speed steel and the last types of tools we'll look at are the cut-off blades or parting blades this is a carbide insert type which has this little part right here that's replaceable and this is sort of my go-to which is just a basic high speed steel cutoff blade it's held in a special type of holder that's intended for cut off blades and again for home machines with less horsepower and less rigidity high speed steel is really I think the way to go any tool bit is going to be held in a tool holder this is the most common style that you're going to encounter this is the alors style tool holder of course it does a lot more than just hold a bit in place as you can see there it also allows you to set the height of the tool bit relative to the tool post it allows you to save that setting if you will for each tool which is extremely useful because what that means is if you can afford to dedicate one of these to each tool bit then you can set the height once on them and you can swap these tools very quickly without having to set the tool height every time which is a huge huge time-saver and and then of course they have these dovetails on the back and everything here is precision ground so I mean what that means is that these tool holders are repeatable so you can take this tool out and put it back as many times as you want and each time you do that and the cutting tip of that tool bit is going to end up in exactly the same place relative to the material that's extremely powerful and we'll take a look at that on the wave right now so here's our tool bit installed any tool holder again on the loris style tool post and here's where the magic happens just like that that tool is installed and exactly in the right place relative to the carriage and relative to the chuck and if I take that tool out put another one in put this one back in I know it's landed in exactly the same spot that's extremely powerful and you can see here how the thumbwheel is catching on the edge of the tool post here and this is what sets the height of this tool relative to the tool post and sort of saved that setting for you with each bit this is a tapered wedge style Alaris tool post you might also see the piston style where there's a little piston here that sticks outside and applies pressure to the tool post back to the tool holder but either way they're all going to have this kind of dove a dovetail style or some variation of it and again that allows all these precision ground surfaces to guarantee that this ends up in the same place every single time and one last thing that a lot of beginners ask about the tool post is what's this other holder back here for well of course that's for boring bars boring bars typically need to be ninety degrees from a regular tool bit so that they can go inside the work in that direction this side is also useful for other things but primarily that's for boring bars the last thing to know about tool posts is that you can change the angle of them usually with a wrench of some sort and this allows you to set the angle of the tool bit relative to the material and the purpose of that is to get the right clearance angles for your cutting you want to make sure that that point that single point is doing the cutting and no other sides of the tool bit are going to be touching the work so every tool bit is a little bit different and so this angle allows you to get that set up just right again that does not change the angle of your cut because it's only a single point there the angle of the cut is set by moving the slides and the all right that's the basics of tool bits I hope you found this useful and please tune in for the next lathe skills video coming soon thanks for watching you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 237,819

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, 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

Id: FL0Rz_ip6Is

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 20 2018