The main purpose of today’s manufacturing industries is to produce low cost, high-quality products in short time. They mainly focused on achieving high quality, in term of part accuracy, surface finish, high production rate etc. So, the selection of optimal cutting parameters is a very important issue for every machining process in order to reduce the machining costs and increase the quality of machining products. In this paper, the cutting of AISI 1045 steel material under the wet and dry condition is carried out using CNC lathe machine. Taguchi method is used to formulate the experimental layout. The effect of cutting condition (spindle speed, feed rate and depth of cut) on surface roughness were studied and analyzed. The CNC turning machine is used to conduct experiments based on the Taguchi design of experiments (DOE) with the orthogonal L9 array. Optimal cutting parameters for each performance measure were obtained employing Taguchi techniques. The orthogonal array, signal to noise ratio and analysis of variance were employed to find minimum surface roughness. Optimum results are finally verified with the help of confirmation experiments.