How carbide inserts are made by Sandvik Coromant

Almost everything made of metal is machined with an insert. The insert has to withstand extreme heat and force so it's made of some of the hardest material in the world. A typical insert is made of 80% tungsten carbide and a metal matrix that binds the hard carbide grains together, where cobalt is the most common. It takes more than two days to produce an insert so it's a complicated process. In the material warehouse, row after row of raw material are stacked. The tungsten carbide we use is either recycled or comes from our own mine in Austria. Cobalt, titanium and all other ingredients come from carefully selected suppliers, each batch meticulously tested in the lab. Some recipes contain very small amounts of selected ingredients that are added by hand. The main ingredients are then automatically dispensed at different stops along the weigh line. In the milling room, the ingredients are milled to the required particle size, together with ethanol, water and an organic binder. This process takes from 8 to 55 hours, depending on the recipe. The slurry is pumped into a spray dryer, where hot nitrogen gas is sprayed to evaporate the ethanol and water mixture. When the powder is dry, it consists of spherical granules of identical sizes. A sample is sent to the lab for quality check. Barrels of 100kg of ready-to-press powder arrive at the pressing machine. Up to 12 tons of pressure are applied depending on the type of insert. The binder added in the milling room is what holds the powder together after pressing. The process is completely automated. Each insert is weighed and at certain intervals controlled visually by the operator. The pressed inserts are very fragile and need to be hardened in a sintering oven. The process takes about 13 hours at a temperature of approximately 1,500°C. The inserts are sintered into an extremely hard cemented carbide product, almost as hard as diamond. The organic binder is incinerated and the insert shrinks approximately to half its original size. The excess heat is recycled and used to heat the premises in winter and cool them down during summer. The inserts are ground one by one in different types of grinding machines to achieve the exact size, geometry and tolerances. As the cemented carbide insert is so hard, a disc with 150 million small industrial diamonds is used to grind it. The excess carbide is recycled as well as the oil that is used as cutting fluid. The majority of inserts are coated either through chemical vapour deposition, CVD or physical vapour deposition, PVD. Here, we see a PVD process. The inserts are placed in fixtures. And put into the oven. The thin layer of coating makes the insert both harder and tougher. This is also where the insert gets its specific colour. Although the insert has been inspected at the lab regularly during the whole process, it's manually examined again before it's laser marked and packed. After labelling, the grey boxes are ready to be sent out to manufacturers around the world. When the inserts are worn out, they are returned to Sandvik Coromant for recycling. And the process of making a new insert begins.

Channel: Sandvik Coromant

Views: 2,218,929

Rating: 4.9071674 out of 5

Keywords: How inserts are made, carbide inserts, inserts, grades, inserts and grades, turning, milling, drilling, metalworking, machining metal, Gimo, Sandvik Coromant, recycling, wolfram, automation, tungsten, tungsten inserts, tungsten carbide inserts, how to make a carbide insert, cemented carbide

Id: 0QrynzJ_lZ4

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ShaggysGTI]

Sandvik makes some amazing tools as well as informative videos and demonstrations.

[u/swankpoppy]

This video was absolutely fantastic. Actual manufacturing porn. I was completely enveloped throughout the entire video. Thanks for sharing!

[u/AndrewZabar]

I think the tooling I use in my mini lathe are tungsten carbide. Those things cut through steel.

[u/ahoy_mateth]

Would love to see the recycling process

[u/Xx_Un0riginal_xX]

Read this as "Carbide Insects" and was wondering what on earth was going on.

[u/st1tchy]

/r/manufacturingmanufacturingporn

[u/cryptokadog710]

Powdered metallurgy...used to machine cast bearing caps and eccentric shafts for the powder compacting presses

[u/SlatheredButtCheeks]

Pretty interesting. I wonder what this unnamed 'organic binder' they mix in is made of. Strange that they go so far as to use the periodic table for some of the ingredients, then use some generic nonspecific term for the binder. Must be baby foreskin or some other equally disturbing binding agent.

[u/Nelson_Gryotwat]

I had this post-apocalyptic vision the other night, where I chucked up a piece of aluminum in my drill press and machined it into a part using the carbide tooth of a table saw blade. Now I want to try it.