How to cut tungsten/rhenium wire

Diamond cut-off wheel.

Best Regards Tom.

Pliers with carbide edges are available, but they're very expensive. Cheap diagonal pliers may be most economical if you consider them disposable. Tungsten wire is fibrous, brittle at room temp, and abrasive, but really not that hard.

I've built many devices, both manual and automatic, for cutting tungsten wire. Most used standard carbide tool inserts as shear blades. One cut over 1200 short pieces of wire per minute. The trick to minimizing fracturing the ends is to heat the wire to 400 degrees or so (above tungsten's brittle to ductile transition temperature) when cutting.

Great idea, just what I will do.

Not an answer but a question. What is tungsten / rhenium wire used for? TIG electrodes?

It is very fancy stuff, rhenium is a very expensive metal, four times more expensive than silver.

It is used to prevent high temperature sag of tungsten wire and improve its ductility.

Abrasive wheel in a die grinder or plasma cutter? Or perhaps a shear?

I wonder if a $9 investment in a HF tinsnip trio would cut it. (double entendre intentional) $2.99 straight cut/single

-- Doctors prescribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of which they know nothing.

--Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire, about 250 years ago

Ok thanks.

When I was working with (pure) tungsten wire, I used carbide-jaw diagonal cutters. My wire was about half as thick as yours, though that shouldn't make much difference. Prior to getting the carbide tools, I used regular, better quality, cutters. They did wear faster than normal, but not too bad. My customer supplied the carbide cutters; if it had been my money, I would have bought a few pairs of Kleins (or similar) and saved a bundle.

Joe

Improving ductility would be a plus. The pure W I used was phenomenally expensive (in my opinion): we paid a little over a grand for 300 meters (about 4 lbs). That was way above the standard cost per pound of W. I suppose a lot of that cost was the PITA of drawing something that hard (but I guess they did it while hot). OTOH, another supplier that we used sometimes - Luma from Sweden - charged less than $800 for the same stuff - that was with shipping from Europe.

Joe

Ig, that's fairly thin, pretty hard stuff.

Use a high-speed, small thickness cutoff wheel.

Lloyd

I don't know for certain how it would work with your fancy stuff, but on the low-end of the price range jewelry suppliers sell "hard wire cutters" for cutting what is essentially plated spring-temper piano-wire (memory wire) for not too much money. Not stuff I'd want to feed into my "good" normal wire cutters (intended for copper wire, seen plenty with "serrations" from someone abusing them with hard wire, which is one reason they don't get loaned out.)

Looking at those, I'd guess they have a small carbide blade brazed in place - no edge damage visible. Without looking up the invoice I'd guess $15 3 years ago. Quite possibly they vary, as with most mass-market things. I paid a bit more to get USA made ones. Xuron 2193, made in Saco, Maine.

Tungsten with tungsten/rhenium is used for a high temp thermocouple pair in non-oxidizing environments.

bob prohaska

Clamp it in a vise and shear it with a cold chisel?

Joe wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Lindstrom (and others) make "hard wire cutters" that might do the trick. They would certainly last longer than regular ones. I use Lindstroms at work to cut berylium copper pins on RF connectors, and they work fine. Any other cutter is toast after one shot.

Doug White

You would need carbide tip cutters . I have a couple suppliers that I use . What price do you sell this material at?

Before I bought anything to cut the wire, I would try bending it back and f orth a couple of times using ordinary gas pliers. And if that did not work use an abrasive cut off wheel. Should work. Aluminum oxide grinding whee l is what you use to sharpen TIG electrodes.

Dan

Regular cutters seem to work also. I sell it for $3 per linear foot. Sold a lot already.

I thought Silicon Carbide wheels?

MikeB

Regular wheels work just fine.