Today fibre-reinforced plastics (FRP) occupy an important place as high performance engineering materials. Although in most of the fabrication processes used for glass-fibre-reinforced plastics (GFRP) machining is avoided, sometimes the machining of an FRP product to achieve the required shape and dimensional tolerance cannot be avoided. In the present work, the face turning of filament-wound GFRP tubes using high speed steel (HSS) tool bits is studied. This paper examines the mechanism of material removal during GFRP machining and the type of tool wear in HSS tools with different cobalt contents. The mechanism of tool wear is explained with the help of scanning electron micrographs of worn out tool faces. © 1989.