Flat brass strips in 360 series recipe.

Engraver font copy was allegedly made of 1/2 or 3/4 hard brass in various letter styles and could be purchased 1 ea,2 ea and in a set designated 4 or 5 by how many letter A's it contained. Sooner or later someone is going to remember a lot sooner than I did that I have a 2 spindle B/port tru trace which would be a lot handier than doing a 1 to 1 on an
engraving machine so capable. Looking up purveyors of brass convinced me that 360 series
would have to be the material up to the task or not.
Question is therefor, "how does free machining 360 compare with the old brass for wear"?. The tracing groove is 90 degrees vee and .060" + or- deep. If the brass is also
maleable as well as free machining I suppose hard chroming might suffice as a cure, but the price of brass being what it is, substituting 12L and hard chroming that might be a lot smarter. Anybody? Thanx. tomas Tom Burgess ,Kalispell,MT.

I think 360 is the obvious choice, but it should be hard, not annealed. Hardness (tensile strength) for 360 should be about the same as for unleaded brass, so wear should be comparable. I think cold finished bar shapes are usually sold in half hard and sheets are usually sold soft.

My Green engraving machines use type made from 3/32 thick brass in 3/4, 1-11/16, 2-5/8, 3-9/16 or 6-5/8 widths. The top and bottom edges are square. Strips of cold finished CA 360 3/32 x 3/4 are easily obtainable, but the wider sizes will require more of a search and will need to be machined from the next standard size up.

Green used vee-grooves in the type for their large D2 engraver, which had depth control at the spindle and a spring stylus arm. They used square bottom .030 wide grooves for their small 106 engravers, which had a rigid stylus that also controlled depth of cut.

New Hermes used flat bottom grooves with sloping sides. Their type has beveled top and bottom edges, as does Preis Panto type.

Larry

Larry, Thank you for your advice and what amounted to a goad for more research. This got into history going back to 1837 or close by, the Philadelphia mint and coinage, Budd wheels, of Troy, MI. and a seller of various tool and alloy steels as well as 360 type brass, Aluminum, plastics and all of that right in Reis's back yard or down I- 5 from him.
360 does indeed come in a different form. Same ingredients but different processing.
The strips are extruded and come half hard. E.g. 0.125" X 1" BRASS 360 H02 (1/2 HARD) EXTRUDED RECTANGLE . I stumbled across the seller by accident, and lost my immediate rush to favorites or bookmark because of a lightning strike 10's of miles away tripping the automatic switches on our local power feed. This is what brought on the long history jaunt. I learned that the seller became a wholly owned outlet of Thyssen/Krupp and from the phone number that it was in Seattle. That led to a chapter of history and a note of hope for U.S. industry due to forward looking by Thysen/Krupp.
I started with the T/K home in Duisberg. Deutschland and worked forward. The U.S. mint? Freidrich started Krupp steel. Young Alfred with a real coining press- not the
capstan screw and 2 huskies to turn it. He sold the Philadelphia mint on the production
gain Later old Fred figured a way to get rid of a lot of the Ph in the Lorraine/Ruhr iron and sold the Pennsy railroad really good rails and the 1 piece wheel axle and journals for train cars. Krupp kept their presence here in spite of wars, depressions etc. until they themselves had money problems and Thyssen bankers helped them out T/K started
their march in 1999 commencing with the Budd Wheel Co., in Troy, MI. From that an elevator company and then assorted acquisitions. T/K is building a state of the art Stainless Steel facility in Brazil to be on line in 2009, Cost 3 billion Euros and will employ 3000 persons. A companion rolling mill with re-melt capability is ,so it
is explained, being built in the U.S. Slabs will be shipped from Brazil rolled here,
and also to Europe. This American mill will also produce carbon steel products. The mill
to be producing by 2010. is near Calvert, Alabama covering 3500 acres will employ 2700 persons and cost $3.7 billion. Ground breaking was last December. The “billions” could be suspect. I used a parallel translation into English and their billion is not same amount of zeros as ours. I find new large scale steel production in U.S. to be hopeful T/K seems to be putting a lot of their profits where they got them. The profits are not headed for the
PDRC. I have edited and re-edited this daily, always finding something new and shortening it. Webb www.onlinemetals.com
Tomas (Tom Burgess,Kalispell,MT)