I love working with brass and copper. It comes in several varieties and so color tones. Red to Yellow. With this the hardness can be changed. Old optical microscopes had many brass parts and so some of these high quality threads are very dense/fine.
One cautionary note. Some brass alloys, as with many metal alloys, contain a variety of metals..... some of which are poisonous. So if you are making dust that you might breath then wear a mask for sure! By the way lots of metals are poisonous and are not meant to be ingested. One's tolerance to these is an issue of quantity. A few years ago they decided that lead in plumbing solder was bad. So they forced the manufacturers to remove the lead. However, to get it to still work properly, in some cases, they substituted smaller quantities of even worse metals! These provide various properties, lowering the melting point, improving wet-ability to copper, strengthening, etc. .... Silver, Antimony, Cadmium, Bismuth etc.
One cautionary note. Some brass alloys, as with many metal alloys, contain a variety of metals..... some of which are poisonous. So if you are making dust that you might breath then wear a mask for sure! By the way lots of metals are poisonous and are not meant to be ingested. One's tolerance to these is an issue of quantity. A few years ago they decided that lead in plumbing solder was bad. So they forced the manufacturers to remove the lead. However, to get it to still work properly, in some cases, they substituted smaller quantities of even worse metals! These provide various properties, lowering the melting point, improving wet-ability to copper, strengthening, etc. .... Silver, Antimony, Cadmium, Bismuth etc.
