Originally Posted by
panz
... I'm under the (mistaken?) assumption that all hot rolled steel was soft, gummy and relatively easy to work with....
The first part of your assumption, hot rolled steel is soft and gummy, is correct; the second part is not correct.
Hot rolled mild steel, 1018 or something like that can be difficult to work with; especially when you have a machine with limited rigidity and horsepower.
Here is what I have learned from my experience:
Hot rolled machines best with negative rake tooling running fairly fast such as 400 or more fpm taking a decent cut per tooth and a decent depth of cut with a powerful airblast. This is how you remove material fast to get close to size or if your tolerances are loose to the finished size.
When you want to put fine detail or just take very light cuts off hot rolled then your tactics have to change and you drop the speed, feed per tooth and depth of cut, drown everything in coolant and probably use positive rake cutters. You definitely don't remove material fast.
For a novice working with hot rolled can be a PITA especially with a marginal machine whic to some extent is your situation.
Somewhere up the page someone suggested going to leaded steel and this is definitely a good idea. It is possible that you would be ahead even if you had to use leaded steel round bar and chew your shape out of that.
You embarked on trying to do this yourself because shops in the area wanted $800 to $2500. That is a wide spread: How many shops did you contact? Did you provide them with proper working drawings or CAD files? Were these quotes for one piece or the total cost for a couple of dozen pieces?
Right now it is my opinion you are in a hole and you don't get out of a hole by digging it deeper.
An open mind is a virtue...so long as all the common sense has not leaked out.