What are the benefits of aluminum machining?

Choosing the right metal for your project can be hard. Worried about difficult machining or poor results? Aluminum machining¹ offers many great advantages for your parts.

Aluminum machining provides excellent machinability, a high strength-to-weight ratio, and great corrosion resistance. It also offers good thermal and electrical conductivity, and it is highly recyclable, making it perfect for many applications and easy to work with.

At SWA Forging, we live by our slogan: "Master Southwest Aluminum Right." We specialize in large-diameter forged aluminum rings and discs. Our customers, often traders or machining plants, frequently take our high-quality forged blanks and perform further machining operations. So, I often get asked about the specific benefits of machining aluminum. It's a topic close to our hearts because the better our clients understand aluminum's properties, the more they appreciate the quality we deliver. Let's explore why aluminum is such a favored material for machining.

Why is aluminum good for machining?

Picking the right material for machining can be tricky. Concerned about wearing out tools quickly or getting a bad finish? Aluminum's properties make machining easier.

Aluminum is good for machining because it is relatively soft. This means you can cut it faster, your tools last longer, and the chips are easier to manage. It also allows for good surface finishes with less effort.

Aluminum's machinability is one of its most celebrated characteristics. When I talk to Machining Plants' Sourcing Managers, this is often a top consideration. The relative softness of most aluminum alloys means that cutting tools can remove material with less force compared to harder metals like steel. This translates directly into several practical benefits. First, you can use higher cutting speeds and feed rates, which means parts are made faster, increasing productivity. Second, your cutting tools experience less wear, so they last longer and don't need to be replaced as often, saving costs. Third, aluminum typically forms manageable chips that are easily cleared from the work area, reducing the risk of chip jamming or re-cutting, which can mar the surface. Alloys like 6061 are particularly well-known for their excellent machinability. While it's soft, it’s not so soft that it becomes "gummy" like some very pure aluminums, especially when in specific tempers like T6. The surface finish you can achieve on machined aluminum is often excellent, sometimes requiring minimal post-processing. Our forged products at SWA Forging, with their refined grain structure, provide an even better starting point for machining, ensuring consistency for our clients.

What are 3 benefits of aluminum?

Searching for a material with many upsides? Tired of materials that only meet one or two of your needs? Aluminum offers a powerful combination of advantages.

Three major benefits of aluminum are its light weight (giving a high strength-to-weight ratio²), its fantastic resistance to corrosion, and its excellent ability to conduct heat and electricity, making it extremely versatile.

Aluminum truly is a remarkable material, and it's easy to highlight three standout benefits that make it so popular across industries.
First, its light weight combined with good strength. Aluminum is about one-third the density of steel. This high strength-to-weight ratio is a game-changer for applications where reducing mass is critical. Think about the Automotive Industry striving for fuel efficiency or Aerospace needing to lift components into the sky. Lighter parts mean less energy to move them.
Second, aluminum has excellent corrosion resistance. This is due to a naturally occurring, thin, but very protective layer of aluminum oxide that forms on its surface when exposed to air. This layer self-repairs if scratched. This means aluminum parts often don't need heavy paints or coatings, saving cost and maintenance, especially for the Construction Industry using it for curtain walls or structures.
Third, aluminum is a great conductor of both heat and electricity. It's not as conductive as copper by volume, but it's much better per unit of weight. This makes it ideal for heat sinks in electronics or power transmission lines.
These benefits are why Traders find aluminum such a versatile material to stock, as it serves a wide array of downstream customers. We see this demand reflected in the orders for our forged rings and discs.

What are the advantages of machining?

Thinking about how to make your parts? Not sure if machining is better than casting or 3D printing for your needs? Machining offers unique precision and flexibility.

Machining offers high precision for complex shapes, achieves excellent surface finishes, works with many materials, and is often cost-effective for prototypes and small to medium production runs without high initial tooling costs.

Machining, as a manufacturing process, has several distinct advantages that make it indispensable in many situations. One of the primary benefits is high precision and the ability to create complex geometries. Modern CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machines can achieve very tight tolerances, often measured in micrometers. This is crucial for parts that need to fit together perfectly or perform precise mechanical functions, something our Machining Plant customers demand.
Another advantage is the excellent surface finish that can be achieved directly from the machining process. Depending on the cutting tools, speeds, and feeds used, you can get surfaces that are smooth, reflective, or textured as needed, often eliminating the need for secondary finishing operations.
Machining is also versatile in terms of materials. While we at SWA Forging focus on aluminum, the machining process itself can be applied to a vast range of materials, from plastics to composites to hard metals.
For prototypes and small to medium production runs, machining is often more cost-effective than processes like die casting or injection molding, which require expensive custom tools (molds or dies). With machining, you can often go directly from a digital design to a finished part, making it ideal for quick iterations and custom orders. This flexibility is a huge plus.

What are the advantages of turning machining?

Need to make round or cylindrical parts? Wondering what's the best way to produce items like shafts, pins, or discs efficiently? Turning has specific benefits for these.

Turning machining is excellent for creating cylindrical parts with high accuracy and good surface finish. It's very efficient for features like grooves, tapers, and threads on round workpieces, often at high speeds.

Turning is a specific type of machining operation that excels at producing parts that are symmetrical around a central axis – basically, round parts. It involves rotating the workpiece (like an aluminum rod or one of our forged rings) in a lathe while a stationary cutting tool removes material. The advantages here are quite clear for certain geometries.
First, efficiency for cylindrical shapes: For components like shafts, pins, bushings, and discs (like the ones we forge at SWA Forging), turning is often the fastest and most cost-effective way to achieve the final dimensions and features. It's inherently suited to creating these rotational profiles.
Second, high accuracy and surface finish: Modern lathes, especially CNC lathes, can produce turned parts with very tight dimensional tolerances and excellent surface finishes. This is critical for parts that will be part of rotating assemblies or require precise fits.
Third, versatility in features: Turning isn't just for making plain cylinders. It can easily create a variety of features on round parts, such as grooves (for o-rings or snap rings), tapers, contoured surfaces, shoulders, and threads (both internal and external).
Many of our Machining Plant customers use turning extensively to finish the forged aluminum rings and discs they purchase from us, preparing them for applications in machinery equipment or other industrial uses. The consistent quality of our forged material makes their turning operations smoother and more predictable.

Conclusion

Aluminum machining offers great benefits like ease of cutting, light weight, and corrosion resistance. The machining process itself provides precision, making it a top choice for many industries.