On Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:09:22 -0800, Grant Erwin
wrote:

pyotr filipivich wrote:


But there are "issues" with working with railroad rails, mostly having
to do with work hardening of the bearing face, the place where the wheels
roll on the rails. The home machinist means of fixing this is to put the
piece of rail in your fireplace, build a nice fire, and let the metal
anneal over night. Remove, clean up and mill as per normal.


.. or just use carbide tooling

A kid brought me over a 18" section of really heavy rail to make an
anvil out of. Clamping it down to the table of my MasterMill, I
installed by very best carbide inserted face mill, calculated speeds
and feeds and melted off everyone of those teeth in about the first 8
inchs.

that **** is HARD.

We finally finished it, and it came out nice..but the second one he
did..we did the bonfire trick and it machined like annealed 440c.
Sweet job to machine once its been annealed and all that work
hardening is softened up.

Gunner






" We have all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million
typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of
Shakespeare...Thanks to AOL and WebTv, we know this is not possible."