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Metalworking (rec.crafts.metalworking) Discuss various aspects of working with metal, such as machining, welding, metal joining, screwing, casting, hardening/tempering, blacksmithing/forging, spinning and hammer work, sheet metal work. |
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Work hardening, on purpose?
Hi all,
The question: Has anyone ever heard of intentionally using a work hardening material, such as so much of the stainless family, and actually adopting processes to work-harden it, on purpose? I understand that this would be pretty much just a case-hardening, but for sliding surfaces, when you are hardening primarily with wear resistance in mind, would you need anything more than a case-harden? Has anyone ever heard of this being a successful production model? Some background: I've been trying for years to develop products that will be either significantly better than the competition's work at no more than what they charge, or something to do the same ``job,'' whatever that job may be, every bit as well as their product, much less expensively. The ideal, of course, would be to offer something that works better, *AND* is significantly cheaper. The objective is to fundamentally change the design of some ``gizmo'' (whatever it may be) to make it significantly easier to build, and thus, cheaper to sell. The idea is NOT to do all the easy stuff that weasels tend to look for like using cheaper, inferior materials, be cheap with employees, etc., etc. No, I don't want to build junque, and I sure don't want to have to have employees that need constant babysitting, and who won't produce anything good unless they think they're being watched. I want to build something of which I can be proud, and if I hire anyone, I want to hire folks that will care deeply about doing good quality work, and encourage them to do so with a paycheck in which *THEY* can take pride. I want to take a product with an established market, fundamentally redesign it to make it simpler, easier and thus, cheaper to build, obtain the appropriate patents and start selling it. After lots of false starts, well, maybe this latest one I've been working on just might be the answer. Then again, it might get tossed onto the scrap-heap of other ideas in my head. Still a little too soon to tell, at the moment, but it sure does look promising. The product: I'm certainly not going to go into any detail on the design, but I think I know how to build a wedge style quick-change tool post that I suspect I may be able to sell for less than what I see even the cheapest piston types go for. Hence the reason for this post: I figger, this is probably a reasonable place to go for advice, as a lot of the experts are here, besides, if this works out, y'all are gonna likely be the beneficiaries of this new toy, so why not ask you folks to lend a hand, eh? :-) The problem: Material selection stinks! My father used to tell me that the most difficult thing for any engineer to do was just choosing the material. Although I never doubted his word on that, I'm now getting a wee-tiny little taste of it. In trying make a tool that is both inexpensive and of exceptional quality, material selection will, of course, play a huge role, so I sure want to get it right the first time. The way I see it, nothing says ``I believe in my product'' like one of those no questions asked ``forever warranties'' such as is found with Zippo and the like. I very much want to do that. In doing so, I certainly don't want to see a bunch of parts coming back to me. Obviously, the only reason to do such a thing is if you believe so strongly in your product that you don't think you'll see a lot of parts coming back. The way I see it, material selection for this tool comes down to (at least): 1) Strength: I don't want it to deform even under constant, heavy use. 2) Wear resistance: For obvious reasons. 3) Corrosion resistance: Even in nasty environments (i.e. coolant). 4) Processing cost: For obvious reasons. Cost of material, I'm not really all that concerned about, believe it or not. From what I can tell, that looks like it'll probably be just about the least of my expenses in this endeavor. I'm far more worried about how much it's going to cost to process whatever material I choose. Strength, well, actually I suspect that's one of the least of the above worries. I suspect that pretty much any steel of any reasonable quality will probably be strong enough. Most of the strength will come from the mass of this thing, I suspect, not so much from the steel selection, but it is important enough to at least include it on my list of worries. Now, some suggestions I've gotten are for either Ni-chrome-molly or at least chrome-molly types (4340 or 4140, and such like so). Some disadvantages I see there are that in order to really get the most out of them, they'd need to be heat-treated. That just seems way to costly to me. Remember, I want to offer exceptional quality at a really good price. I know I can get these metals in various conditions, but it just seems to me like this is something of a tradeoff: If I get it soft enough to machine at all, even only with great difficulty, it seems like that's going to be soft enough to allow more wear than I'd like. Further, I do believe both of these are somewhat corrosion resistant, but are they enough so that one could expect these things to stand up to coolant and time? I even got a suggestion for O-2 (machines well, heat treats well were the attributes named by the suggestor), but there again, to get the kind of wear resistance I want out of it, it would have to be heat-treated, eh? One of the things I've been thinking about is a good stainless. Most (I know, not all, but most) of the stainless family doesn't heat treat well at all, but it *DOES* work harden. That's normally considered a bad thing, but I'm starting to wonder. In particular, if I understand this right, a lot of this stuff work hardens particularly when cold formed (rolled). I'm wondering if I could actually use this otherwise detrimental quality to my advantage. I'm wondering if I should consider cutting the parts a little over-size and running them through an eleventy buhzillion ton rolly-squeezy-mashy machine for final forming. The way I see it, if such an approach actually works, it could have some advantages: 1) I'd get to build myself a really cool rolly-squeezy-mashy machine, and I'd get to watch it go. 2) Obviously, my corrosion worries would be pretty much over. Yeah, I know, stainless really isn't guaranteed to be really stain-less, but hey, I should be able to afford to (and, really, should expect to) replace at least a few of these things. It should be pretty unlikely that I'd get a lot of corrosion, no matter what form of nastiness someone's putting in their coolant, in their misguided attempts to keep it from going foul. At least I'd have the satisfaction of knowing that even though I have to replace a tool post, well, they probably had to replace a whole lathe. :-) 3) I'd get to build myself a really cool rolly-squeezy-mashy machine, and I'd get to watch it go. 4) Hardening without heat treatment. No fumes from whatever form of nasty stuff you quench with (depending on the material chosen and effect desired) to make people sick. None of the stuff slopping on the floor waiting for someone to slip on and hurt themselves. Nobody looking over my shoulder to see what I'm doing with the stuff, and above all, it would *HAVE* to be cheaper to build and run a specialized rolly-squeezy-mashy machine than a specialized heat-treat facility. 5) I'd get to build myself a really cool rolly-squeezy-mashy machine, and I'd get to watch it go. 6) I'd think I'd have to worry about finish (while machining) a lot less. If I'm gonna run my parts through that rolly-squeezy-mashy machine after machining, it seems to me that thing is gonna put the finish on, not my cutters. So, when my cutters start getting a little dull, and the finish starts to get a little stinky, I just say to myself, ``huh, I guess I'd better think about indexing those things around sometime in the next week or so'' shrug and go back to turning the cranks. 7) I'd get to build myself a really cool rolly-squeezy-mashy machine, and I'd get to watch it go. Yeah, OK, so it's not perfect, either I'm sure. For starters, I have no idea how hard I'd be able to get my sliding surfaces, or for that matter, just how well that hardness will translate into wear resistance. I know there's a correlation between hardness and wear resistance, but I don't know if this process would really be good enough in that regard. For that matter, I don't even know if it would necessarily be any better than what I could get from some, say, condition medium 4340 without any post-machining heat-treat. I realize that my rolly-squeezy-mashy machine would probably not be the end of the processing. Presumably, I'm not going to get the exact right shape coming out of that thing, so I'd probably have to grind some after that, too. What about internal stresses? What are those going to do to my tool posts? I sure don't want, 20 years from now, to hear a ``*BOINK*'' as the first of my tools that I've been shipping for the last 20 years falls to the floor in a buhzillion little pretzel shaped pieces. That would be considered a bad thing, I believe. Has anyone out there heard of doing such a thing successfully? I've been scrubbing the Net, and all the references I find say something like ``unfortunately this material work-hardens...'' as if there is no possible upside to that. Is that really so? Is this just yet another bad idea grunted from my brain which needs to be abandoned like so many of the other steaming mounds my brain has grunted out over the years? Anyone wanna offer support for some other materials and/or methods? BTW, if anyone has pointers to exact dimensions for all (or any, really) the Aloris tool holders of various size, I sure would appreciate hearing about that, too. I've been seeking and not finding. I certainly want to match their dimensions as they've become, pretty much, the defacto standard, as far as I can tell. Thanks, tg. -- To reply by mail, remove all lower case letters in my return address ). |
#2
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Work hardening, on purpose?
The other Thomas Gardner wrote: Hi all, snip 450 stainless. John |
#3
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Work hardening, on purpose?
Thank you. I'll look into it.
john wrote: The other Thomas Gardner wrote: Hi all, snip 450 stainless. John -- To reply by mail, remove all lower case letters in my return address ). |
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