Bronze is a family, not a material. Gunmetal, phosphor bronze, aluminium bronze, nickel aluminium bronze, leaded bronze and manganese bronze look much alike across a workshop bench and behave nothing alike in service. Pick on hardness alone and you can finish with a bush that outlasts the shaft it runs on — which is the expensive way round, because the bush is the part meant to wear.
This is webinar one in the Kormax Smarter Engineering with Bronze series. It covers what bronze actually is, how the naming systems line up against each other — LG2 and the old BS 1400 designations, the C-number system, the European descriptive standards — and then works through each alloy family in turn: composition, strength and hardness, typical applications, and what each one needs from lubrication. The second half is the practical problem: identifying an unknown or failed bush from a drawing, an XRF reading or a lab analysis, then choosing a replacement against operating temperature, surface speed, loading and shaft hardness. Forty minutes, with a live Q&A.
Part one: selecting the best alloy · Part two: machining techniques · Part three: fitment and lubrication
What the webinar covers
| From | Covered |
|---|---|
| 1:43 | What bronze is — a copper-tin alloy, and why the name now covers a whole family of copper alloys |
| 2:44 | How it is made — continuous casting, centrifugal casting and extrusion, and the size and shape each can produce |
| 5:50 | Naming systems — LG2 and the obsolete BS 1400, the C-number system (and what the first digit tells you about cast versus wrought), and the European descriptive standards |
| 10:25 | Gunmetal (LG2 / C83600) — composition, strength, hardness, and where it fits as a general-purpose material |
| 12:40 | Phosphor bronze (PB1, PB2) — the gear bronzes: better wearing, and why the tin content drives the price |
| 14:07 | Aluminium bronze (C954) — higher hardness, the shaft-hardness limit that comes with it, and heat treatment |
| 17:04 | Nickel aluminium bronze (AB2 / C95800) — corrosion resistance and marine use; C95500 where more strength is needed |
| 19:02 | Leaded bronze (LB2 / C937) — heavy-duty crusher and mining bushes, embedding abrasives, and the environmental pressure on lead |
| 20:46 | Manganese bronze (HTB3 / C86300) — a high-tensile brass under another name, and the environments to keep it out of |
| 22:24 | Identifying an unknown bush — the material box on the drawing, a portable XRF gun, or lab analysis |
| 24:32 | Choosing a replacement — lubrication regime, maximum and minimum operating temperature, surface speed and galling, loading, and shaft hardness |
| 27:24 | Live Q&A — whether casting method changes the physical properties, which alloys need lubrication, heat treating before or after machining, behaviour in water and steam, silicon bronzes, and what to use for a heavily loaded worm wheel |
