Designing Custom Carbide Parts
How to design carbide parts
Tungsten carbide parts are made in one of three ways.
1. The powder is pressed and sintered.
2. The powder is pressed and pre-sintered. It is machined in the green state and then gets the final sintering. In this method the green state part is extremely soft and very easy to machine. However the dimensions will change during the final sintering so there’s some uncertainty in this method.
3. You take a finished part such, as a rod or a blank or a square, and grind it down using a diamond wheel. This method gives you the tightest tolerances but is also the most expensive.
It is often advantageous to have custom carbide parts made. A couple of very common reasons are to aid assembly or speed up production.
I had a case that started a couple months ago where a customer had an idea to speed up his production with a specially designed custom carbide part.
He had a good idea of what he wanted but did not know how that translated into what the carbide companies could do. The carbide companies could do whatever he wanted but they had to know the tolerances before they could design the parts and determine the correct production method.
After a couple weeks of uncertainty I went ahead and ordered some carbide test parts on my own hook. I ordered about a dozen parts in each of two sizes. It took about a month to get the parts and about a week for the customer to test them. The customer had been very close on his estimates but, once he saw actual parts, he changed a couple tolerances a little bit.
It cost about $180 for the carbide test parts and took about a month to get them. However it greatly sped up the whole project. We are now ready to order production parts. The customer knows what he will be getting and the carbide company knows what they are supposed to make.
For the cost of $180 we got the project moving again, solved some questions that were not going to be solved any other way and had a huge amount of reliability to the whole process.
Any time you’re in the design process and can add reliability, solve your problems and get your project finished for $180.00 you have an absolutely clear win.
We are always happy to work with people on new projects.
If you have an idea or design we would love to hear from you.
Sales@carbideprocessors.com or call us at 800-346-8274
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