A Brief Overview of Stainless Steels

Whenever my usual means of obtaining "Hobby money" funds dry up Ill put an ad out on CL or FBMP for machining services and wind up doing something unusual for unusual people.

Had an older guy, an artist and architect hire me for a job making a set of stainless steel wind chimes. Picture a group of 8 cattails 12' tall grouped closely together that would bang together in the wind.

The "Chimes" were randomly found pieces of stainless anywhere from 1" to 2" in diameter and from 9" to 1.5' long, with the 12' stainless poles being IIRC .500"

All I had to do was drill a hole in each chime for a light press fit on the poles.

All I had to do.......

Most of the chimes drilled to size with no trouble, 3 of them gave me fits. I got this done through trial and error never having worked with the difficult to machine grade of stainless before, but man, that stuff did not want to be drilled.


Reviewing the information on that link I would guess those three to be in the Duplex family.
 
Good article, but I think there might be a mistake in the table. It lists duplex as non-magnetic, but the duplex I worked with was noticeably magnetic, enough so that the scrap yards would only give mild steel prices for the scrap machine parts at a former employer. It may be just the grade we used and the rest is non-magnetic, but that stood out to me.
 
I am currently making injector tubes out of 304 Stainless steel for a John Deere 8850 V8 tractor for a client. The tubes that came out was some kind of steel and was badly corroded so I read up if you can make it out of any other material and mostly reccomend was stainless steel. Cummins started using stainless steel for their injector tubes because they started using extended life antifreeze and that apparently corrodes softer materials quicker(See article below).
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However I must tell you that I am not fond of working with stainless especially tapping procedures and spesificly 316 although it gives nice shiney finnishes and I like shiny things. Thank you for the article @MrWhoopee .

Michael
 
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