Ballscrew turning?

Tempering does not require cherry red (or any other shade). Make sure there is metal showing (like the turned down portion, for instance). Use the torch to heat the metal. It should start changing colours. It will start going to yellow, then blue, then purple, roughly (my mind is foggy in this regard). These are not *glowing* colours, but rather it will look like the metal is stained.

However, I would not recommend heat treating ballscrews, however. You will probably cause warping.

You have to have a beefy lathe to machine these things, and it really helps to have *auto* automatic feed shutoff as you should be feeding quite heavily when machining hardened steel (with carbide, of course!) A slow feedrate will get a nasty finish. Something like a .004-.008/rev with a 1/32-1/16" nose rad will work. Use 1/4 the SFPM you would with carbide on steel normally (about 70ish).

Use brazed carbide. You'll probably muck up the nose of your cutter pretty quick. No coolant/fluid!

Make sure the screw is securly held in the chuck/collet. It may want to move.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Robin

You want to heat the end fast and keep the rest of the screw cool. In industry it is done with inductive heating IIRC. It is still tough turning through the interupted cut of the screw even after annealed.

Fred

Toolpost grinder ?

Cheers Trevor Jones

Why not just grind it to the requirement?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX >Torsten wrote:

Grind the ends on an OD grinder rather than trying to turn them. They are hard for a reason and need to stay hard.

Gunner

"What do you call someone in possesion of all the facts? Paranoid.-William Burroughs

Update I did just as described, worked out great. The screws are very easily machined once the are annealed properly.

Tell us how they work after some cycling...

Regards,

Robin

I expect them to work just fine. Only the ends have been anealed, the area used by the Nuts are unchanged.