Bronze is not one material, and it does not machine like one. Leaded gunmetal and tin bronze chip short and cut much like cast iron — flat-top insert, cast iron grade, dry if your sizing allows it. Aluminium bronze and manganese bronze are a different job: they behave closer to machining 316 stainless, the chips curl rather than break, and insert grade, coolant and surface speed all have to move with them. Reaching for the same tool and the same feed across the whole family is where tool life, surface finish and scrap value are lost.
This is webinar two in the Kormax Smarter Engineering with Bronze series, recorded live with a working bronze machinist. It goes alloy by alloy — insert style and grade, speeds and feeds, coolant and filtration — for anyone turning bronze on a centre lathe or a CNC lathe, then moves to the specialist end: oil and lubrication grooves in bearings, keyways, deep boring and surface finish. Thirty-four minutes, with a live Q&A at the end.
Part one: selecting the best alloy · Part two: machining techniques · Part three: fitment and lubrication
What the webinar covers
| From | Covered |
|---|---|
| 2:02 | Agenda and scope |
| 4:39 | Turning techniques are the subject; milling is flagged for a separate session |
| 5:41 | Choosing an alloy for the application, and bar length — why aluminium bronze arrives in shorter bars than brass |
| 6:18 | Keeping alloys apart: cross-contaminated swarf is worth close to nothing at the scrap dealer |
| 10:13 | Health and safety — airborne particles on a centre lathe, extraction on an enclosed CNC |
| 11:26 | Leaded gunmetal and tin bronze: C-style flat-top insert, cast iron grade, running dry, PCD and CBN wipers for finish |
| 13:56 | Short-chipping alloys and coolant filtration — what short chips do to a pump and a through-coolant tool |
| 17:14 | Nickel tin bronze (CuSn12) for worm gears — stainless-grade inserts, 200–600 m/min |
| 18:01 | Aluminium and manganese bronze (954, 863) — machining closer to 316 stainless, water-soluble coolant at 5%, 250 m/min up |
| 22:11 | Specialist oil and lubrication groove systems in bearings, right-angle milling heads, keyways and broaching |
| 26:53 | Case study: spherical ball liners for one of the largest front-end loaders in service |
| 27:48 | Live Q&A — the single most important thing when machining bronze, deep-bore tooling beyond 4×D, and the QA process behind tight tolerances |
