Metalworking fluid (MWF) differentiating is of important significance as their additives affect metalworking process extremely so the evaluation of MWF should be suitable conducted. Acoustic Emission (AE) measurements can be easily taken as process-close measures for evaluating cutting and forming processes as well as MWFs performance. In thread forming process, AE measurements from different kinds of MWFs could be – related to the position of the tool - divided into different process phases: air, forward, and reverse phases. From physical view, forward part contains most useful AE data. Therefore, extracting forward part data from the overall signal is significant for MWFs classification. Because boundaries among different parts in time domain of AE signals are not clear, in this contribution, a new data processing method is proposed to abstract the forward part data from non-related parts of the whole measurement signal. For the first time, scalogram is applied to find the boundaries in time domain as an aid. Firstly, the intact measurement signal is transformed from time domain to time-frequency domain by continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and scalogram is acquired. As boundaries among different phases are obvious in scalogram, by reverse calculation, boundaries’ location in time domain could be defined and forward part data of each measurement are picked out. Afterwards, data in forward phase are divided into different samples and each sample contains data of one round. Finally, samples’ features are extracted and classified by convolutional neural network (CNN). By adjusting CNN structure and hyperparameters with cross validation method, features in time domain could be distinguished well. For five kinds of testing MWF, the classification accuracy is as high as 98.11 %. For reference, oil-based, and water-based MWF classification, the results can reach to 98.94 %. Accuracy for water-based MWF distinction is 97.55 % while for oil-based MWF distinction is 98.29 %. Comparing with results using the whole AE measurements, these results improve significantly. Good results show that the proposed data processing method could extract most useful information from the whole AE measurements in time domain for MWF distinction. Besides, the proposed method also provides an effective way for data analysis in the future.