In it for the long haul, high-quality refractory blades are available from many diamond tool suppliers, but the manufacturers of these aggressive cutting tools are often found wanting, to say the least. Cutting to the chase, generic blades don’t get the job done, at least not for long. If you want your DIY furnace project cut right, be sure to opt for a high-performance refractory cutting blade.
What Are Refractory Materials?
If the job involves refractory materials, you’re probably about to cut through a heat-resistant stone. It could be a fragile ceramic base, a harder kiln material, or even a heat conducting cement. If this is your DIY project, those materials have probably been accumulating for weeks while you plan out the outlines of the furnace. The problem is this: these are no ordinary bricks and cement mixes. To absorb copious amounts of thermal energy, there’s alumina additives and silica suspensions contained in the denser than average bricks. Without a refractory blade, those heat-absorbing additives will quickly blunt a regular abrasive cutting surface.
Utilising Refractory Blades
Using refractory blades is the solution, plain and simple, to employ a purpose-designed abrasive disk. The diamond configurations, bonding agents and steel cores that form this blade type are uniquely designed to assault hard or soft refractive materials. Remember, even if those furnace bricks are softer, they contain blade-fracturing additives. Those alumina or silica grains have a habit of shortening an expensive cutting disks lifespan. To counteract this expense-incurring effect, heavy-duty refractory blades handle those brick-suspended additives while cutting quickly and accurately along a planned incision line, as marked out by a determined DIY-er.
The Diamond-Densified Difference
The blades don’t look much different. They can even be mixed up with a conventional dry cutting abrasive disk. The difference is found in the denser diamond matrices and the harder cores. Stronger steels and carbide-reinforced alloys strengthen the tool surfaces, then time-released bonding agents reveal new layers of diamonds as the older ones fracture after encountering a line of brick-embedded alumina particles. Specced in all common bore sizes, diamond configurations, and rim profiles, refractory blades are found in all shapes and sizes in the Tooltec inventory.
Think of different hard and soft materials. There are hard concretes and fragile tiles. Refractory materials occupy a hard-to-define category within that cutting spectrum. They can be soft, sure, but then there are coarse and super-hard grains locked inside that soft outer shell. To create your DIY furnace, the selected abrasive tool has to account for those thermally absorbent, super-hard additives. As the DIY-er, keep your project cost-effective and on-point by selecting a suitable refractory blade.
