Turning Nickel Silver

[niall Y]

It must have been beginners luck , last time, because when I turned some 18mm diameter ferrules and rings, from some 20mm nickel silver rod; I don't remember the hassle I have encountered this time around.

I spent the whole of today making 4 x 18mm outside dia. x 6mm long ferrules, They were admittedly slightly more complicated,in design having two inner diameters. of 12.7mm and 14mm with the step down about 2mm from the end.

The struggle seemed to start from the off. Cutting away a section with a hack-saw was tough going and took forever. I set it up in my ER32 chuck on the lathe and attempted to drill out with a centre bit but it just wouldn't work i used a small cobalt bit instead to drill out enough to take a revolving centre.
I then tried to reduce the outer diameter to a tad over 18mm. The cutters all seemed to struggle to give a smooth surface and I had to resort to emery to get rid of the ridges Drilling out the centre with an 8mm cobalt bit first followed by a 12mm one, again was really hard going with the lathe shaking and juddering despite applying lots of cutting fluid.

I even resorted to annealing the workpiece, hoping for an improvement, during the next stage. I used a tungsten tipped boring bar to widen the drilled centre and was getting some nice shavings. But the lathe juddered so badly I had to attach a G cramp to hold the tool post down to the carriage. Things did start to improve from hereon in, though I found I had to sharpen the parting tool every time I made a new cut. At the end of the day I feel I've struggled a lot, for so little reward.

 

[Sideways]

This was interesting to me as I had a tiny powerful flashlight from the early days that was machined from nickel silver and it was a lovely thing the way it burnished and remained undamaged over many years until I dropped it off a 2nd storey roof and dinted it a little.

Never machined the stuff but there are tales of NS work hardening, being stringy, gummy, just rather awkward, preferring sharp positive rake tools like the polished, aluminium cutting, inserts. And the term Nickel Silver covering a multitude of different alloys.

Sometimes you do just get lucky. Stainless is the classic for me. Get in ! Get cut ! Get out ! as an old mate used to say. Easy enough if you are decisive and take a robust cut.

Image from the web. Mine's sadly gone.

 

[niall Y]

Never machined the stuff but there are tales of NS work hardening, being stringy, gummy, just rather awkward, preferring sharp positive rake tools like the polished, aluminium cutting, inserts. And the term Nickel Silver covering a multitude of different alloys.

Sometimes you do just get lucky. Stainless is the classic for me. Get in ! Get cut ! Get out ! as an old mate used to say. Easy enough if you are decisive and take a robust cut..

The best cut i managed was with a tungsten insert that had the minutest semicircular groove around the top of the cutting edge. This, I suppose, gave it a slightly positive rake. I'm not so sure how one of those tips for aluminium would perform, but I'm willing to try just to improve things, even a little.

 

[Amplidyne]

No real experience of machining the stuff, but I know that nickel work hardens like crazy. We has some tube that turned out to be nickel that we were trying to drill when we were lads.
It's going to depends very much on the particular alloy that it is I'd have thought. I've been looking at NS to replace the pins in an old, but little used Ibberson penknife that has been "got at" in the far and distant past, and wondered what it machined like if necessary.
Another little "project" for "sometime"