Lead Brass

Purpose：Observe the microstructure of lead brass. Lead brass exhibits excellent machinability, mechanical properties, and resistance to cold/hot pressure processing, making it ideal for soldering and welding. It is widely used in structural components such as screws, washers, gaskets, bushings, nuts, and nozzles. Samples undergo cutting (TableCut200), mounting (FLEX-PRESS fully automatic modular hot mounting machine), grinding/polishing (Alpha610), and etching with a ferric chloride-hydrochloric acid aqueous solution to observe the microstructure (MN80 metallographic microscope).

Basic Guide：

Cutting：1.Use a silicon carbide cutting wheel. Refer to the Trojan Cutting Guide for specific models.

2.Select pulse mode for cutting, with a recommended maximum cutting speed ≤0.25 mm/s.

Mounting：Use high-edge-retention cold/hot mounting resin.

Grinding：1.Begin with P400 silicon carbide sandpaper/lapping films/diamond grinding discs until the sample surface is flat and cutting damage is fully removed. 2.Continue fine grinding with P800, P2000 sandpaper or a POS disc + 9 µm diamond polishing suspension.

3.Clean the sample, sample holder, and hands after each grinding step.

Polishing：1.Clean the polishing cloth, sample holder, and hands before polishing. Repeat cleaning after each step.

2.Do not mix polishing disks with different abrasive particle sizes.

3.Rinse the sample surface with alcohol and dry with a blower to remove water residue.

4.After each polishing step, inspect under a metallographic microscope to ensure scratch size matches the abrasive grit and direction is random.

5.Clean polishing cloths with running water and a soft brush after use, then air-dry.

6.Dedicate polishing cloths used for lead brass exclusively to such samples.

7.If surface protrusions remain after polishing, regrind and repolish while reducing polishing time with silica + ZN suspension.