Carbide Lathe Tooling Advice

[sanddrag]

I bought a pack of these back in 2006 and it's all I use for turning and facing on two different lathes. I haven't even been through half of them yet.

[scottandme]

I'll pile on to the rest - just pick up SCLCR/L (RH & LH) holders in whatever size you like, and a pack of aluminum/nonferrous inserts. McMaster sells Dorin holders at ~$48 each, and the aluminum specific inserts are $6.90/ea for a box of 10 (3244A316 or 3244A318). I forget the brand of the inserts, might be Mitsubishi.

Shars also sells the "CCMT" style aluminum specific inserts, they're listed as CCGX on their site. Never tried them, but in case you wanted to pick up the boring bar/holder cheaper from them.
http://www.shars.com/products/view/8..._3251_LH_YD101

[R.C.]

As a side note,

We've been going through our tooling and consolidating it all. One thing that we liked doing was making sure most if not all of our lathe indexable tooling used the same insert. We currently have two lathes and are picking up a third soon. So its nice that the inserts work across both machines.

Our boring bars, turning holders (1/2" thick and 3/4") thick both use CCMT. We went with the 32.5X size. Inserts from latheinserts.com or Maritool are awesome.

For all our grooving stuff we use thinbit, the inserts work both in the 1/2" and 3/4" holders we own.

Originally Posted by Aur0r4

We have no holders yet, which is why I wanted to pick a type that was good for most robotics work and standardize on that, as AlecS mentioned.

Jim, if you PM me I can send you the list of stuff we just bought/will be buying.

-RC