Turning Boring and Drilling Nitralloy 135

[ricotututi]

Does anybody have experience working with Nitralloy, I working with it and are having problems breaking the chips, and boring it, I will make 10 good pcs and them 1 bad and so on, any recommendations will be helpful.

[FieroNate]

I haven't worked with it but I pulled the datasheet

http://www.matweb.com/search/Specifi...ssnum=NTIMK009

it appears to me that the material is age hardenable, so you have to know what condition it arrives in. Also you want to make sure you dont' overheat it. If it is work hardenable it could explain the diffculty you are having.

The folllowing article describes it as a material designed to be hardened. My guess is if your chips are coming off blue or yellow then you are overheating the material. When this happens your rockwell C goes from a 21 to a 41, From my understanding anything over about a 35 is considered difficult to machine.

http://www.steelforge.com/metaltidbits/nitralloy.htm

Try slowing your cuts and using coolant to machine it.

[Paulo E.]

Sorry to say I have no experience with the material either.
I do have a bit of advice to offer. Depending on what tool supplier you use
give them a call and tell them the material your cutting. 9 times out of 10 they already have the data on the material available. This services are provided free of charge and who would be best to give you advice on cutting the material than the people who made the cutting tool to begin with.....

Ps: Try Iscar for turning tools and Titex for your drills specially when your trying to cut some hard material. If the part is large enough then you might want to consided using Greenleaf ceramics to do most of the roughing and possibly the finishing of your turning.

I info is of some help to you. \^_^/

[NC Cams]

Nitralloy is variation of 41330/4140 chrome moly with additional alloys added to make it respond (harden) via the nitriding process. The additives (pretty sure one is aluminum) makes it particularly wear resistant under abrasive environments - the stuff is often used for injection molding nozzles, ones that inject glass fibers which are particularly abrasive.

The stuff is not particularly reputed to be easy to machine due to the alloy content and the abrasive resistance of the alloy. Due to the alloy content, it can readily work harden while cutting if you don't cut it properly.

Any work hardenable material does NOT like to be rubbed or man handled, you want to get in and CUT it. Hence, get hold of your tooling supplier and ask them for the best speeds, feeds and tools to cut it - then follow their advice TO THE LETTER.

We ran into a deal like this, albeit with stainless, some time ago in a prototype shop I worked at. The 'expert' machinists all threw their best techniques at it only to have tools come away from it smoked and/or broken and the part NOT cut.

After contacting a tool contact, following their advice EXACTLY, the stuff cut like butter....