Price of lathe tools

[cardiffpat]

Looking in a recent mag I noticed that Greenwood lathe tools were £30+ each & inserts £4 to £5 each. Is there any reason why I cannot just buy their insert & make my own holders from mild or silver steel?, since it will not be taken to anywhere near the elastic limit the small amount of flex should be exactly the same as a Greenwood original.
I am puzzled as to why these simple insert holders cost so much.
If I am missing something here, can someone please tell me?
Regards (Pat the worker)

[JohnP]

As far as I know, Young's modulus for steel is pretty well the same whatever the flavour, so a tool made by yourself would be as stiff as the Sandvic one sold by Greenwoods. Alternatively, buy a cheaper holder and fit Greenwood's tips.

JohnP

[ron]

Pat
Don't know which tips you use but £4 to £5 seems expensive, I've twice recently bought a pack of 10 on Ebay for less than £20, plus you can buy good quality holders and boring bars by Glanze for about £20 or less.

Ron

[alanstepney]

Errum, dont know why you buy tips at all.

For 90%, maybe 99% of ME work, ordinary tool steel is quite adequate.
And, MUCH cheaper.

[3405jimmy]

Well everything blunts eventually but I don’t think I would swap any of my tipped tools for a hunk of HSS.

I do use it if I need some sort of fancy radius, but other than that I like to see them blue chips flying.

Jim

[Tel]

alanstepney said:

Errum, dont know why you buy tips at all.

For 90%, maybe 99% of ME work, ordinary tool steel is quite adequate.
And, MUCH cheaper.

I'm with you AJ - apart from skinnin' cast iron, my t/c tips stay in the drawer

[ron]

I'm with Jim here, spent the second 6 months of my apprenticeship getting the backside bored off me learning how to grind tools to some exact angle or other, I'll stick with tips, they are cheap, last for ages if you aren't careless with intermittant cuts and the angles are a lot more accurate than I can manage.
Ron

[cardiffpat]

So it looks like some companies are charging £30+ for a short length of steel, nice work if you can get it eh?

[steammadman]

Pat, Yes you can buy t5hese tips and then make your own holders
i did this years ago,i bought some "cheapie " tips at an exhibition
made a coupe fholder and away i went.
There was an article printed in M.E.W. some time ago,describing how to make
these tip tool holders, ican't remember off hand when but i will look it up for
you if you like.
but beware of those blue chips ,best stick to them from the chippie down
the road.

[chris vine]

Hello Pat, if you give J and L industrial supply a call (0800 66 33 55) and ask for their catalogue you will find the most amazing selection of metal cutting tools. They are a very straightforward company to deal with, the girls on the phone usually know what they are talking about and if they don't know the answer there, they will have a specialist to help. Best get the catalogue first before asking tricky questions though!

I am not sure that the holders are much cheaper than greenwood but you can always buy a greenwood holder and get the tips from J and L.

If you want the odd special like a left hander, just silver solder a tip onto a bit of mild steel, they don't seem to be any worse for heating to red.

Personally I would never contemplate going back to HSS for most work. With tips you can leave the lathe in top gear for almost all work on steel up to an inch diameter or even more. It really does help to have a good flow of coolant though.

Chris.

[waggy]

Being a cheapskate, I buy tips at the exhibitions, those in a box at 50p each sort of thing. I silver solder them to a piece of HSS for strength and use them only for breaking through cast iron. Before you solder them, give the bottom a good rub on wet and dry paper to remove the outer coating. Emery not much good, tips are very hard.
I "treated" myself a couple of years ago to one of those button tools to turn a beautiful flange radius on my Duchess wheels. Chatter, I thought the wife was in the workshop!! I'm sure the lathe moved with vibration. Maybe OK in a beefy machine that can absorb the bad vibes, I didn't like it though. Finished them with HSS tool, smooth as 'owt!

Waggy.

[cardiffpat]

steammadman said:

There was an article printed in M.E.W. some time ago,describing how to make
these tip tool holders, ican't remember off hand when but i will look it up for
you if you like.
but beware of those blue chips ,best stick to them from the chippie down
the road.

Thanks steammadman, I would like to know which MEW the toolholder article was in.

[Phil Sutton]

Back in't days when I wor a lad,we made us own tools from MS for a shank and glued in a tip(buckshee from the NCB) using the ol'oxy acetylene and brazing rod.A quick zing on the grinder and away we went.Cost nowt for scrap bin steel and a pint for the tips.

Phil

[3405jimmy]

philsutton said:

Back in't days when I wor a lad,we made us own tools from MS for a shank and glued in a tip(buckshee from the NCB) using the ol'oxy acetylene and brazing rod.A quick zing on the grinder and away we went.Cost nowt for scrap bin steel and a pint for the tips.

Phil

Ditto Phil, prior to reading your post today I was talking to my old foreman when I was an appy.

We got on talking about the self same tips which I guess at the time came from Shillbottle colliery. Well Alan reckoned when they demolished the NCB area workshops in Ashington Tips by the thousand were just bulldozed into the fill.

Sounds like a bit of an urban myth to me still it might be worth getting Geo- phis up from Time Team to look for something useful for a change

Jim

[davidimurray]

The toolholders really are a rip-off, the manufacturers will even admit that! I was talking to one a while back who said they would actually give the toolholders away to large companies and then make the money on the tips!

I find £4-5 a tip a bit ridiculous unless they are specialist tips. I never pay more than £2 a tip and rarely that expensive!

Keep an eye out on ebay for tipped tooling. I picked up an 8mm boring bar and a full box of tips for £10 not long ago.

I think the argument for or against tipped tools really depends on what your doing. I often use a tipped tool to rip the material off, and then leave an allowance for cleaning up using HSS.

Cheers

Dave

[alanstepney]

Some time ago I bought an old Britannia lathe, dating from the 1930's.
The spec reckons that it can remove 1/2" off a 2" or 3" bar in one pass. *
That would have been with steels far below the specification of todays tool steel.
Probably it would have been Lark or some similar make. (I still have some and use them occasionally.)

Whilst tipped tools can be useful, they are expensive, and not needed for most ME work.
After all, how many of us have machines that are capable of turning at the speeds required, or rigid enough to take the cutting depth and feed that results in maximum metal removal?

*Oh, that was treadle operated. Certainly build up the legs!

A few tips are worth having for extra hard metals, and hard spots on castings. One useful source is an old carbide tipped circular saw blade. A whole batch of tips in one neat package!

[3405jimmy]

alanstepney said:

Whilst tipped tools can be useful, they are expensive, and not needed for most ME work.
After all, how many of us have machines that are capable of turning at the speeds required, or rigid enough to take the cutting depth and feed that results in maximum metal removal?

I agree with Alan, for most model engineers taking 10thou cuts off on Myford's with white water flooding the place then HSS is ideal.

Then again if your lathes not fitted with a sowing machine motor and you have a bit of Horse Power to play with, there is another way.

Jim

[Malcolm]

Tips are useful if you are boring a cylinder, so that you don't get one end smaller than the other as the edge wears away.

[davidimurray]

Slight change in subject but out of interest - how big are the cuts you take? At home I've got a tiny little Chinese lathe (its about the size of a unimat) and my normal cut in mild steel is 10 thou, sometimes up to about 18 thou depending on the diameter. This is without coolant. This is fine with tipped tools but not as happy with HSS

At work I use a colchester student (roundhead) and regularly take 60 thou off EN24 stock about 2" diameter using a tipped tool. Brilliant machines those colchesters. Only time it's been beaten was while trying to turn a piece of EN36C. This was passed to a friend who did it on his Triumph 2000. He still struggled and had to use a grinder to get the outside finish.

Cheers

Dave

[cardiffpat]

Hi Davidimurray, I usually take no more than 10-15 thou cuts on my myford, I'm in no great hurry.
Just a couple of points here because I don't want to start a new thread now.
(1) Is home treated silver steel much inferior to shop bought HSS.
(2) The lathe I have refurbished was abused by its former owner & the tailstock taper is scratched, would anyone advise using a morse taper reamer for this or is this taper hardened steel.
I have read that trying to lap tapers does not work well due to the wide part of the taper lapping faster than the narrow part. Maybe it is the case of buying a new part here.
Thanks, Pat