Machining Pure Silver

After wandering into my local car repair garage, and convincing them to fire up their oxy-acetylene torch to melt pure silver grain into my home-made molds, I chucked the results in my lathe to roughly face them off.

I'd heard all kinds of horror stories about machining silver, but it was very well behaved. Nice clean curling chip using a fine grain carbide tool, zero top rake, no coolant, a bit slower speed than 7075 aluminum. Much, much friendlier than OFHC copper. I even think it will tap just fine with a good gun or roll tap and bacon fat or lard lubricant.

Edit: tapped fine with standard HSS gun taps. A little sticky, but nothing to whine about.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2021 03:03PM by rq3.

... I have some ceramic inserts with "sharp" edges, that cuts copper pretty good without any coolant ... for brass and aluminium I've until now used small hard alloy inserts (too "sharp", as my lathe is pretty small, not much power to "squench" the material away with the common cutters wuth "rounded" edges) ... will test with the ceramic ones too ... and sould have somewhere some small PKD cutters, so eager to check them too for the different materials

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Viktor
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