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About LinkBacksI have a CNC machine in the shop where I work and am curious. We use it for aluminum. Do I need to do anything special if I want to use it on brass?
I have a CNC machine in the shop where I work and am curious. We use it for aluminum. Do I need to do anything special if I want to use it on brass?
Remember, there are two kinds of fishermen, those that fish for sport and those that catch something.
brass generally likes things a little slow that AL but faster than steel maybe 125-150 sfm with hss and zero top rake on cutting tools. drills and single point tools should be ground with zero rake. fortunately, you don't have to worry about zero rake on end mills (it would not be easy to do anyway), but the cutters do have to be sharp. Tradition has it that from files to milling cutters, once its used for steel, its not sharp enough for brass.
follow the above, its a pleasure to work and cuts like butter
Last edited by Mcgyver; 06-20-2006 at 03:13 PM.
Everything Mcgyver says is correct but when you are using a CNC you can be sloppy. Turning tools and drills with positive rake will grab on a manual machine because you always have backlash and it is impossible to keep a perfectly steady feed rate manually. On a CNC with no backlash and good feed control it is quite possible to simply put a brass bar in a setup with tooling for aluminum and run it without problems. If any turning tools are HSS simply back the speed down by about 30% but this is not likely as CNC tooling will nearly always be insert carbide.
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