The film shows how chippings are produced from a polished and etched testing workpiece made of the aluminium forging alloy AlCuMgPb, during orthogonal cutting. Because of the coarse-cristalline structure, with grains considerably larger than the maximum chip thickness, cutting causes the formation of chippings of varying appearance in individual crystals of differing orientation. The shearing area, chip-producing mechanism and visible deformation of the workpiece change with the different types of chip, from flowing chip to shearing chip. The influence on the chipping thickness is concealed by the fact that the chip-production is a direct result of the structure orientation in this coarse, polycrystalline material.