you can buy carbide inserts (the easy way). or you can grind a piece of HSS by hand to the correct profile and use that. good for aluminum and steel, and brass, but won't cut stainless as well or as long in my humble experience. if you are not really careful about keeping things cool, the stainless work hardens on the surface and then starts cutting like crap.Bowen1911 wrote:So I kinda understand Acme threads, but what did you use to cut them?
I like HSS, since the lathes that I typically get to use don't run fast enough to get a great surface finish with most of the carbide tooling I have available. Carbide seems to like heavy cuts and fast surface speeds, HSS, depending on the material you are cutting the opposite, which again IMHO is desirable when hand cranking a lathe and single point cutting. gotta take it slow and easy so you don't cut too deep by accident. especially when you are not doing threading all day every day.