Tooling for 17-4 ?

[Sergeant]

Getting ready to turn a bunch of blast baffles in 17-4 stainless. What type of tooling material and speed should I use for this...?

[ECCO Machine]

What kind of machine and tool holding?

Carbide is gonna be your friend. 17-4 isn't especially hard, but it's quite tough and imparts a lot of heat.

I use CNMG and TNMG for outside turning, CCMT (size 06 for most purposes) on boring bars for internal work and MGMN (size 300 for centerfire baffles) for profiling the outside of cones & parting off.

Your speeds & feeds are gonna be dictated more by your machine and tool holding rigidity than anything else. I cut 17-4 pretty aggressively at 350 & 500 RPM with a little gear oil brushed or squirted, but I'm using a good sized machine. I'd have to back way off with a little 1,000 lb Southbend or somesuch.

[Sergeant]

Grizzly 0602
Indexable tool holders

[Matt in TN]

I've recently been using HSS hand ground tooling on a Southbend 9A and it works fine.

[fishman]

This was literally asked 5 threads ago...