Quote Originally Posted by Neville Young View Post
Hi guys,

A little basic help please.
Hopefully we can help.
I run a small repair shop (Lathe, Drill-Mill, Press, grinders, welding, etc.) to make parts and to service and repair Dairy Homogenizes. The only material I use is Stainless Steel (316 & 304 usually). I know very little about the 'stock' material that a lot of the parts/tools listed in this forum are made of
Think of stock as stuff you have on hand. How suitable yours stock is for a specific project depends upon that actual stock. Often the material is "mystery steel" to the author, that is he has no idea what he used to create his project.

This actually highlights a big problem in many shops, if you buy a know piece of stock, say 1018 cold rolled you need to mark it immediately and anytime you trim off the markings. Otherwise it eventually becomes mystery material.
But! Seeing some of the members designs I see a lot of stuff that can help me in my shop - Tool-Past Grinders, Mechanic's Jacks, etc. But I don't know What materiel to use (they say 'a piece of stock'). What the hell is a piece of stock? It's obviously a piece of some sort of steel that they had laying around.
Well this is a learning process, eventually you will get a handle on the various alloys used in the machine shop. I like to think of stock as three major variants, they would be Cold Rolled, Hot Rolled and special steels. Within those groups there are a number of recipes yielding specific features.

I hope I'm not being stupid - It's just that I don't have any 'usual' or 'general' knowledge of the type of material that one would have lying around. Is this a dumb question?
it isn't dumb at all, I learn something new shop related almost every day!
Cheers,
Neville
The best advice I can offer up is two fold.

First read up on the many different alloys sold by the common suppliers. It really pays to bone up with info from the horses mouth so to speak. The reason I say this is that sometimes online advice from the various forums can be very bad advice or simply the result of a misunderstanding.

Second if you have a specific project coming up ask for advice. Just understand that I'm many cases there is no right answer. You could easily get one guy suggesting 1144 and another 4140 for a shaft.