Diamonds sparkle beautifully on engagement rings. However, away from the jewellery shop, diamonds work for a living. They’re mounted on drill bits and other tools. Today, diamond blades are dropping on sandstone blocks, which part cleanly under the abrasive impact of nature’s hardest known material. Come on, let’s check out their key properties. Let’s see what makes a diamond blade so relentless.
Defining Diamond-Tough Cutting Power
It looks like an ordinary blade for a circular saw, the ones used on countless building sites. On closer inspection, though, there are tiny sharp-edged diamonds coating the stainless steel blade. A special bonding agent or a metal sintering process is holding the synthetic gems in place all around the saw blade. Harder than any other material, when the saw gets up to speed, those rapidly rotating diamonds are going to grind down a slender pathway, right into and through a sandstone block.
Quality-Biased Diamond Blade Selecting
Diamond-bonded blade rims are sharp and specially profiled. In action, as the spinning edge contacts sandstone, it uses an unstoppable grinding effect, which wears the flinty material down in a straight line. There’s also a bond hardness-to-media hardness effect in play here, so the solidity of the stone block influences the diamond blade’s wear rate. Then, as the blade leading edge and rim experience this abrasive action, new diamonds are exposed. Clearly, then, material characteristics directly impact a diamond blades’ inherent design qualities. In other words, a selected cutting disc must be matched to an intended building medium. Furthermore, the coarseness and fineness of the synthetic gems aside, the blade geometry should suit an intended application.
Hardened Sandstone Characteristics
Although the tough sedimentary rock is said to be a common building material, it’s not always easy to work with, not without the right tools. Hammer and chisels at the ready, old craftsmen can eventually make headway here, but the work takes time. Diamond blades exert their abrasive energy evenly, so the leading edge of the disc makes short work of the cutting project, even if there are potential fissure lines and granular irregularities within the material. Finally, returning to blade profile issues, there are different blade types, which use uniquely shaped grooves and edge shapes to improve the cut edges. Seasoned craftsmen are, of course, aware of such product features.
There are other qualities and characteristic markers to assess, naturally enough. There’s the blade profile, the continuous or segmented rims. These and other features control wear rates, edge cleanness, material loss factors, and more. They also manage vibrations and noise, plus the heat that this essentially frictional job produces.
