6A14V Titanium Machining?

flatgrinder

flatgrinder

Joined
Dec 20, 2005
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Hi,

Any know if any special belts, drill bits or taps are required when grinding, drilling and tapping titanium?

How difficult is it to grind? Any recommendations on what kind of belts to use? Will cobalt drill bits work? What kind of taps are required? Is anti-seize required on the resulting threads?

Thanks!
 
flatgrinder said:
Hi,

Any know if any special belts, drill bits or taps are required when grinding, drilling and tapping titanium?

How difficult is it to grind? Any recommendations on what kind of belts to use? Will cobalt drill bits work? What kind of taps are required? Is anti-seize required on the resulting threads?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

No special belts required, but that is subjective to the quality of the belt you are using. Any good belt works fine.

High speed steel drill bits work just fine. Keep them sharp and use plenty of coolant. Anything higher than HSS is just gravy. FWIW, I use HSS.

I use high-quality taps and one of my tappers. I use Cool Tool II as a tapping lubricant.

You don't need anti-seize on the threads if you are using the Ti for a knife, in my opinion.
 
6AL4V is one of the percipitation hardening alloys of titanium. If you anneal it, in theory it should be much easier to work than if you leave it hard.

Jim A.
 
You don't need to anneal 6Al4V titanium to work on it, you also can't heat treat it. It can be heat treated by a professional heat treater in an argon atmosphere to increase the tensile strength but not the hardness. You won't need to have this done for anything knife related. If you are miling complex parts (doubtful unless you make airplanes or medical stuff) you may need to have the parts stress relieved but again, I doubt it.

Use HSS E Cobalt drill bits or carbide bits. Use carbide milling cutters and follow the feeds and speed tables provided by whoever makes your tooling. Use flood cooling generally. Titanium dulls tooling very rapidly.

Drill pilot holes for tapping slightly oversize and you will break fewer taps. Use industrial quality taps.

Grind at slower speeds. Smoke from titanium is dangerous, don't breath it in.

Do a search on working with titanium on this forum and you will find a lot of previous threads.
 
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