Can Stainless Steel be Lathed?

Anyone know the answer to this?
and add some 50 characters

Yes, but you have to be careful not to work harden it. It can be tough on tooling, but especially if you work harden it by taking light cuts, or dragging tools with improperl relief on the part.

Do the inserts we usually have in the tool holders work on stainless, or is a different insert needed ?

None of our inserts are carbide. SS is just to hard for HHS

I thought to gold colored inserts on the lathe bits were carbide.

Don’t know for sure. We’ll have to look at the numbers

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So you’re the one that ruined that endmills😁
Just kidding!
It can be done it just won’t last very long

I think all our lathe inserts are Tin coated carbide. Couldn’t swear by it though.

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If the shop doesn’t have a designated set of stainless steel tools I would get your own set.

These are a couple different brands but you want to get ones that you can switch the cutting heads out with. This will make it so you can switch the cutting heads and have a sharp cutting tool without having to sharpen the entire tool. You can buy extra inserts for the tools as well.

Depending on what you are doing you can dull out the cutting head when cutting stainless steel rather quickly. Also when you are doing your finishing pass you can put on a new tip and have a clean finish with little work.

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Will these for sure with the lathe?