How to crush carbide bits?

[janeriksen]

Anybody here who know which kind of equipment or tools necessary for crushing carbide scrap of end mills, inserts etc. into grains of different sizes?
I´m planning to make a machine in order to do this and need some information regarding this topic.

 

[tomwalz]

Lots of different carbide grades, maybe thousands depending on how you count. Transverse Rupture Strength is used a lot in the industry although no one pretends it is very valid. In any case the TRS ranges from maybe 100,000 psi to over 600,000.

There are carbide grades that run on sawmill saws and cut through the odd 12 penny nail.
I figured this at roughly 3,333 foot pound per second.

I don’t think I can add links here but it is on our web page under carbide parts.

We demonstrate by wrapping carbide in a towel then hitting it with a steel hammer. We did a demo where we fired carbide out of a shotgun at a concrete block wall with no damage to the carbide.

You might a simple drop weight tester to get an idea. We built ours with replaceable nylon tips since we wanted more crushing than fracturing.

Also remember the coating comes off if you bake the parts first. It has been a lot of years since we did it but I think we ran ti at about 1200 or 1500 F for about a half hour. Most of the coating flaked off and the rest came off with gentle sandblasting.

If you are going to resell the crushed material for recycling you might want to make sure of your sorting. A little TiCN can ruin a lot of WC in the (re) manufacturing process.

You could probably find an old pneumatic drop hammer for a foundry. We had one for years. I was pretty happy when we got rid of it.


Thomas J. Walz
Carbide Processors, Inc.

http://www.carbideprocessors.com

Good engineering starts with a Grainger Catalog.