Show off Your Machining! 2014

[Cory]

Originally Posted by asid61

What makes you use rectangular stock instead of a large round?

Everything RC said. The only reason to use round would be if you're using a CNC lathe for the first operation.

large diameter round is more expensive than rectangle and you can get into trouble if you don't have a good saw. Any taper in your cut is basically irrelevant with a rectangular block, but is going to cause excess material and time to be wasted with round stock. If you had a cold saw or a really good horizontal bandsaw, you could probably cut square within .001-.005 and go directly into the mill, but like RC said you'd have to cut soft jaws (or use a 3 jaw chuck or something). Plus cutting through a 4" diameter round with the typical bandsaw owned by a FRC team is going to take ages.