What is free-cutting steel?
Free-cutting steel or machinable steel are steel grades that are easy to process and that form short chips during the machining process. Breaking the chips into tiny pieces avoids that a long chip can wrap around the tools, thus ensuring evacuation of the chips. The cutting speed can be highly increased without requiring frequent controls of the machine. The machines can easily produce parts overnight without checking. Free cutting steel is produced in bars and rings and contains 0.08-0.45% carbon, 0.6-1.55% manganese, 0.15-0.35% silicon, 0.08-0.3% sulfur and 0.05-0.16% phosphorus.
Free cutting steel alloys
Free cutting steel has a higher sulfur and phosphorus content than usual. Common alloying elements for free cutting steel include lead in carbon steel and sulfur in stainless steels. Other possible additives are bismuth and tellurium. These alloying elements considerably improve the machining speed already with low percentages of weight, ensuring the durability of the tools.
Certain free-cutting steel grades can also be cured. The qualities are suitable for the production of mass parts such as screws, gears, axes and much more.
We offer a wide selection of free cutting steels such as 11SMn30 / 11SMnPb30 / 11SMnPb37. Some popular free-cutting steels in our stock are Labor Pb (1.0759), LAW 100 Pb (1.1268), LAW 100X (1.1268), Chronifer Special D 18/8 (1.4305), AISI 316 L Décolletage (1.4598), Chronifer Special KL (1.4427 ).
As a reliable supplier of free cutting steel, L. Klein AG also has small quantities of 3m bars and rings for sale on stock. We offer excellent multilingual support and reliable shipping. Locally for the Swiss market, we have our own delivery service, but we supply as well throughout the EU and also worldwide. Our main European customers are in Germany, France, Italy and Spain.
