Thread: Bisalloy for tooling

Hi RC,

Don't see why not... what were you thinking of making?

Ray

Some big v blocks and large box parallels and that sort of thing for on the milling machine and the borer..

Should be fine, it's probably doesn't have the stability of cast iron, but then again it won't crack like cast iron Are you going to do any heat treatment to relieve stresses?

Ray

I make sacrificial angle plates, V blocks etc etc out of HRMS, Bisalloy is going to be an improvement I would think. So - go for it. Fabricated jigs & fixtures are better than none at all. With careful use, the hassles of steel WRT bruising & tearing compared to cast iron can be avoided, and yes, I'd expect to have to check for deviations from flat/right angles etc for critical work more frequently than with CI, but it's all just the cost of working with what we have. I machined up a 12" x 6" x 4" HRMS angle plate on the weekend just to hold port hole castings for accurate hole drilling. I have no compunctions about drilling & tapping holes wherever convenient, I wouldn't do that with a precision CI angle plate..... PDW

A couple of former employers have used Bisalloy for machined parts. It works but because the stuff used was delivered in the hardened state it required decent tips, coolant and a rigid machine. One part I saw being machined was being flooded with coolant but still was shooting sparks off the tool (these were the really hard grades by the way).
Depending on how hard the finished product needs to be you may be better off annealing to make life easier. Probably a good idea after welding to releive stresses anyway

Michael

Bisalloy seems to only come in sheet form and is only available in the hardened form..

There are various grades from not too hard to armour plating for military use..

I have some 12mm and 25mm bisalloy plate here that is carbide only... I have made some bigger parallels out of the 25mm.. They came up well...

Hi RC,
Like others here, I make up jigs and fittings as I need out of what ever is to hand. Just yesterday I needed some spacers to set two plates parallel to each other. So since I had a couple of pieces of brass block and they were only 3 mm something too big I milled them to the size I needed. I've done the same with angle iron if I needed a 90 degree support.

I'm guessing your thinking about tooling for your borer. Bis can be a pain to machine, we chew through inserts at work when we machine it. Wouldn't bother trying to use Hss, unless you want to get some cutter grinding practice in. At work we have a heap of packer blocks that came from Perry engineering (huge machine shop back in the day) they are fabricated from ms pipe and plate. i will get photos tomorrow. We have made a few v blocks and parallels at work from ms and they have held up alright.

Here are the photo. I included a 6" rule for scale
IMG_0540.jpg
We made these v blocks for a job at work. We profile cut them and milled the up. They also have keys in the bottom so we don't have to clock them up all the time.
IMG_0541.jpg
We have a few different sizes of these. They cane from an auction, I'm pretty sure they are a bit of heavy wall pipe welded to some m/s plate. The number painted on them is the length. A few of them have a bulge in the pipe and are a few mm shorter than they are meant to be
IMG_0542.jpg
These ones are fabricated and really solid. We also make parallels form 40-75mm round bar. We face them to length and surface grind them. They get used all the time and they hold up pretty well, we only have to regrind them every 2-3 years.

Thanks for the pictures...

Some pretty big iron there, and an opportunity for plenty of scraping practice to true them up!

Originally Posted by Ropetangler

Some pretty big iron there, and an opportunity for plenty of scraping practice to true them up!

Are you volunteering?

Originally Posted by snapatap

Are you volunteering?