A smile? That's a gash! SO let's say I decide I want to melt down some brass faucet parts into some round stock.... Will it turn worth a damn on the lathe?? Or should I just buy stock? Looking on fleabay, it's not cheap and I'm sure to make a lot of scrap?
It will turn beautifully, so long as you have a good sound casting to begin with. Bar can be cast vertically but the last few inches at the top can be porous.....so you melt it again and make more bar from the leftovers, there's always bar scrap as the chuck jaws have to grip something.
I found bath and faucet taps a good source of brass. I didn't remove the chrome either but in the sake of public interest I understand there is a very very serious health risk with burning off chrome.
I have to get some suitable brass flux and there's also a coagulant to form the dross into a lump for the skimmer. There are differences in mechanical properties of extruded vs cast, I understand extruded aluminium is 10% denser than cast aluminium and that's without getting into the mechanical properties so brass would likely be similar. Here's a close up of a brass casting made from all manner of corroded scrap that was rough machined a few years back and has tarnished a bit:
I'd be happy with that! I'm only looking to make blingy knobs and junk. I'm too young for the steam engine thing these days. I cannot believe what they are asking for this stuff on ebay. INSANE money. For 2" stuff, it's like 20bucks an inch! Those are hooker rates!
My local hardware store loaded all the brass hardware into a skip and scrapped it in favour of 304 stainless steel hardware five years ago....only problem with that is seeing your bolts glow a dull red when you try to make some battery terminals out of stainless.
I told him stainless was no good for boat bus bars and terminals but he had to find out the hard way, the starter wouldn't even turn the Gardner turbo diesel motor over while it all smoked
I had a boss do the same using gutter bolts over brass on the low voltage high current transformers we were making. I told him but sometimes you have to let people find out the hard way! The cost of replacing the fried trans was a great deal more than a few boxes of bolts and using his technical brilliance he later decided brass was the way forward. Sometimes you just have to smile and wave Edit: He was quite proud he 'solved' the problem which was highly amusing
