Carbide insert polishing
For toolmaking industry
GPAINNOVA’s client is a company specializing in designing and manufacturing high-quality carbide tools.
THE PROBLEM
Conventional mechanical surface finishing processes are ineffective in polishing tungsten carbide, as it is too hard to be eroded. Consequently, the improvement of surface quality results in uncontrolled rounding of the edges. Alternatively, chemical and electrochemical processes lead to corrosion and spontaneous cobalt release in a reaction known as leaching. Leaching causes the loss of the binder metal, leading to structural collapse.
Before adopting GPAINNOVA’s solution, the customer used a robotized arm for diamond brushing and final grinding with a diamond disc to polish the cutting inserts. They employed abrasive brushing tools with filament-integrated diamond grits. This process proved to be significantly resource-intensive, requiring additional time per piece and a complex robotized cell.
THE GOAL
The client was looking to improve production capacity and quality while reducing the cost of polishing carbide inserts. The customer needed to surface finish the tools to achieve higher quality and longer lifecycles.
The target was to achieve a mirror surface finish and a significant roughness reduction to reach an Ra goal below 0.01 μm (4 microinches). The parts are ground to have the exact size, geometry, and sharpness after polishing, so there are no specific requirements regarding edge radius. Additionally, improving the aesthetics of the tool would be valuable. Since most inserts receive a coating at the final step, enhancing the surface quality before this stage is also beneficial.
THE SOLUTION
Considering a weight removal of 0.04 grams per piece and the weight removal capacity of a DLyte’s PRO500’s full media work bowl of 210 liters —in the case of carbide with dry suspension media, it is 4.04 kg—, GPAINNOVA, thanks to its DLyte solutions, can treat 100,000 parts per media lifecycle. Based on the processing time of 40 minutes and an estimated total time for loading and unloading the holders of 4 minutes, the total process time is 44 minutes per batch of 160 pieces. The daily output, considering 1 shift, is 1,600 inserts, and the annual output, assuming 250 working days, is 400,000 units.
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