Gerald Miller wrote:
Whatever you do, do not resort to using the 1"- bar from someone's
disused weight set. That is some of the worst machining material I
have ever encountered - worse even than re-bar from Mexico.

Ummm ... I've used one of those weight bars & it was OK. Thinking that
maybe it was an exception, I just went down & cut off a piece of another
one that I have.

On the lathe with an HSS bit & 100 fpm or so it *was* crappy. Bad
tearing. I tried a carbide bit at 400 fpm & it was pretty good:

http://home.comcast.net/~bobengelhardt/WeightBar.jpg

That's a finishing pass of about .003 DOC & .003 feed (the ruler is mm).

Once again it goes to show that YMMV,
Bob