Re: Tungsten Flashlight, or something else?
Matt: The pattern will be milled into the surface, not knurled.
Ryan: You could be right--I really don't know if Mac made one or not.
And now I'll turn this thread into a WIP thread. Admittedly, I haven't gotten very far on the machining of the light, but I have started.
Here's the 1" square stock in the four-jaw chuck; and, yeah, it does stick out more than I would like, but I am taking light cuts.
Tungsten seems fairly nice to machine, at least this alloy, which is 95% W and some other element. Unlike Ti, W makes small chips, not long strings, and it does not work harden. I suspect that getting a super smooth shiny surface will not be in the cards, however.
Here I've taken a good portion of the bar down to 25.4mm diameter, or 1". At this point, I remove the piece from the four-jaw chuck and place the turned down end into a collet.
Once in the collet, I can now turn down the remaining square portion of the bar.
After the entire bar had been reduced to 1" diameter, I drilled and bored the interior to 17mm, so that I could insert an expandible collet into the piece. That would allow me to access the entire length of the bar, now about 57mm, in one continuous pass.
So, the turning operation continued until the OD of the entire bar is now just slightly larger than 21mm, which will be the final diameter of the light.
Next operation will be to split the part, parting off what will be the battery tube. Then I'll drill and bore out the battery tube so that it can be placed on another expandable collet. From there I can then proceed to cutting the axial grooves and circumferential grooves that will create the squares.
