Materials Commonly Encountered By Machinists
A machinist is to metal as a woodcarver is to wood. The most common materials that machinists make parts from are steel, aluminum, brass, copper, and various alloys of these materials. Other less common materials such as vanadium, zinc, lead, or manganese are often used as alloying elements for the most common materials. Materials that machinists work with occasionally are plastics, rubber, glass, and wood products. Rarely, machinists also work with exotic and refractory metals. The term exotic metals is a general term describing out of the ordinary, rare or special purpose metals. A synonym might be space-age. A list of exotic metals might include, but is not limited to, titanium, beryllium, vanadium, chromium, molybdenum and tungsten, as well as special high-temperature metal alloys like Inconel or Hastelloy (sometimes called superalloys). Very often the meaning of the term suggests the need for specialized handling and/or tooling to machine them effectively.
While the foregoing were primarily the materials that a machinist would be cutting, the cutters that the machinist uses must be harder and tougher than the materials to be cut. The materials in the cutters a machinist uses are most commonly high speed steel, tungsten carbide, ceramics, Borazon, and diamond.
Machinists usually work to very small tolerances, usually within 0.010" or 0.25 mm (more commonly expressed as ±0.010"(Plus or minus ten-thousands of an inch) or ±0.13 mm), and sometimes at tolerances as low as 0.0001" ((plus or minus one tenth of an thousand of an inch)0.0025 mm) for specialty operations. A machinist deals with all facets of shaping, cutting and some aspects of forming metal, although forming is typically a separate trade. The operations most commonly performed by machinists are milling, drilling, turning, and grinding. There are other more specialized operations that a machinist will less frequently be called upon to perform such as honing, keyseating, lapping, and polishing, to name a few.
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Famous quotes containing the words materials, commonly and/or encountered:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have watched ... many literary fashions shoot up and blossom, and then fade and drop.... Yet with the many that I have seen come and go, I have never yet encountered a mode of thinking that regarded itself as simply a changing fashion, and not as an infallible approach to the right culture.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)