High Speed and Stainless steel

woodturner

Trying to locate a few pieces of each to make a few homemade woodturning tools. Looking for 20mm stainless steel pipe for ferrules (i know they are normally brass) and a piece of high speed steel around 1 1/2" wide 2 mm thick and 8" long.

paddy147

woodturner wrote: »

Trying to locate a few pieces of each to make a few homemade woodturning tools. Looking for 20mm stainless steel pipe for ferrules (i know they are normally brass) and a piece of high speed steel around 1 1/2" wide 2 mm thick and 8" long.

Lesley Reynolds Steel Merchants out in Ballycoolin Ind Estate or else Amari Ireland out beside Liffey Valley.

Both stock stainless steel tubing of all sizes and lengths.

slowburner

woodturner wrote: »

Trying to locate a few pieces of each to make a few homemade woodturning tools. Looking for 20mm stainless steel pipe for ferrules (i know they are normally brass) and a piece of high speed steel around 1 1/2" wide 2 mm thick and 8" long.

Are you making a narrow gauge parting tool? Good quality reciprocating bimetal saw blades (the ones for cutting metal) can be ground to make fine parting tools and they would be a lot cheaper than a HSS blank of the same dimensions, if you could even get a blank that thin. Even stout hacksaw blades for jigsaws can be used; they are mostly HSS, but carbon steel is grand too.
Qualpex inserts make great ferrules.

Alun

Not really of much direct help, but it might be of interest to other people making their own tools ...

Anyway, there's a small-ish UK company called Ashley Iles that have stands at all the major woodworking shows in the UK that sell all kinds of different sized pieces of (unfinished, i.e. no edge) HSS on their stands as well as handles of various sizes and (albeit brass) ferrules. The managing director himself mans the stall, and is a great guy to talk to as well.

I've made a few unusual scrapers and other tools from stuff I bought from them at the now defunct Axminster show a few years ago, including as it happens a 2mm thick parting tool (although not as wide as what you're looking for.)

slowburner

Ashley Isles carving chisels are the cat's cahunas - never tried their turning chisels but I'd imagine they'd be good - maybe even as good as Hamlet

woodturner

Alun wrote: »

Not really of much direct help, but it might be of interest to other people making their own tools ...

Anyway, there's a small-ish UK company called Ashley Iles that have stands at all the major woodworking shows in the UK that sell all kinds of different sized pieces of (unfinished, i.e. no edge) HSS on their stands as well as handles of various sizes and (albeit brass) ferrules. The managing director himself mans the stall, and is a great guy to talk to as well.

I've made a few unusual scrapers and other tools from stuff I bought from them at the now defunct Axminster show a few years ago, including as it happens a 2mm thick parting tool (although not as wide as what you're looking for.)

Thanks Alun. How wide is your parting tool? I was kinda going by the dimensions from a Robert Sorby catalogue. I am also trying to source aluminum pipe and rod but finding it difficult to source also.

Alun

woodturner wrote: »

Thanks Alun. How wide is your parting tool? I was kinda going by the dimensions from a Robert Sorby catalogue. I am also trying to source aluminum pipe and rod but finding it difficult to source also.

It's about 15mm wide and the blade is 150mm long. They also have a much wider version (no dimensions given, but it looks like an inch or more), that's got a knife style handle instead of a round one and is ground as standard with only a single bevel similar to the one on the Robert Sorby site.