Making diamond glass cutter

"Ed Huntress" wrote in news:b7SZi.6300$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe08.lga:

Mostly what I see are special alloy bonds (solders or brazes). Good luck finding out what they are made of though.

Every once in a while we use diamond "plated" or "impregnated" tools. They all look like they are some sort of solder or braze. Then there are the PCD and natural diamond tipped inserts. They look brazed to me, but how they do it I don't know. I'll have to ask some of the tooling guys now that my curiosity is up. The big thing nowadays is diamond coatings. Used for non ferrous alloys of course.

I think your diamond cutter sounds easy to make and cheap as I expect you have all the parts but I would have a look at toyo and silberschnitt glass cutters, they do a range for different uses. From my connection with glass blowing I know a number of people that do glass cutting of thin and small items very easily with small TC cutters. One recently was cutting small pieces that would end up as earrings, that glass was 2mm IIRC and varying sizes from 8mm x 8mm to 12mm x 12mm to give an idea of size. Curve cutting also should not be a problem with these type of cutters.

ed the way that they are made and the way that a friend made his was to electroplate a solution filled with diamond dust on to the carrier. in the case of a saw you slowly rotate the edge of the disk through the electroplating mix. nothing actually glues the diamonds they are just enveloped in the deposited electroplate. graham didnt find the making of his terribly difficult. he found that his home made ones were far better than the commercial ones because his actually were loaded with diamonds. when they wore out he stripped the existing residual plating back into the electroplating mix and then just coated them back up again. he did a lot of inspiring model engineering with his before his health started to fail.

Stealth Pilot

Yipe, that's some delicate soldering. I'll bet those jewelers don't drink coffee.

-- Ed Huntress

Now *that's* serious hobby metalworking. What did he make with these tools?

-- Ed Huntress

I would cross cut the end of a brass rod to make an expandable slot to wedge the chip in. The end would look like a plus sign in a circle. The cuts don't need to be very deep or wide and would give you a more workable way to position the point in the best direction.

Then either braze or solver solder around the stone to hold it in and fill in around the chip.

Tony

I ought to write all these ideas down. Maybe there's an article in it.

Anyway, that sounds good, but I have a lathe and I can bore a little hole that's just the right size in the end of the handle. Then I *could* peen the end over, but I'm intrigued by the idea of brazing it in -- not for the glass cutter I'm asking about, but for a wheel dresser. My ambitions are expanding as we go along. d8-)

-- Ed Huntress

You will still need to drill and a hole and peen it in. Diamond's specific gravity is low enough that it will float in the molten metal unless you use some system to hold it under.

With jewelery, sometimes, when the stones are small enough and the mounting is just going to be scrapped, it is more efficient to melt the whole thing and skim the diamonds off with the flux.

Paul K. Dickman

OK, that's what I would have suspected, but did you see that article from GE that Don pointed to earlier? Very interesting. They took diamonds and brazed them flat to a flush end, and then sharpened 4"-wide grinding wheels with them. It makes me question what I thought I knew about things like this.

-- Ed Huntress

Ya, it makes me want to know more about Titanium Hydride and the mechanism by which it promotes this bond

Is it doping the surface with a wetable film or is it the flux from hell?

Paul K. Dickman

Ya' got me. I read it late and bleary-eyed. I'm going to read it again.

Since this is chemistry, there's a good chance I won't understand it even then.

-- Ed Huntress

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:52:11 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, "Ed Huntress" quickly quoth:

Go for it, Ed! (and scare up a copy for us, eh?)

-- Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization. -- Charles Lindbergh

The list is long. The trick is to find somebody who will pay for it, and I have to tell you, this kind of thing usually doesn't pay to turn your printer on. d8-)

However, you never know. What I might do is find out how they're doing it in industry these days. You may know that there's at least one company that's making thick synthetic diamond tools by depositing a very thick layer via vapor deposition, and then dicing them up. I know they braze them onto the tool shanks somehow, but I haven't talked to them in around six years.

This is very different from PCD, which is sintered and thus has some metal in it, and, of course, regular diamond coating, which is just deposited on the metal substrate.

But not this week. I have a lot of fish to fry.

-- Ed Huntress

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:49:54 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, "Ed Huntress" quickly quoth:

I'm unaware of how any of those are made and I'm really sold on diamond sharpen-/hon-ing plates.

OK, next week it is. ;)

-- Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization. -- Charles Lindbergh

I did a little googling and found there are some silver brazing alloys that contain Titanium and are used for brazing diamonds. So maybe the titanium hydride is not necessary.

Dan

Lots of talk about cutting glass, with some excellent responses.

Question:

What do you do with glass that requires the cuts you've mentioned?

Harold

he was building a table top sized model of a steam pumping engine of the type originally used on the perth to kalgoorlie water pipeline. it was a scottish corliss steam pumping engine of quite an advanced design.

his work was/is absolutely exquisite. the intent was a functional working model. much of the scaled detail was done by spark eroding, which leaves a hardened surface behind. diamond files were needed occasionally to persuade a piece into a more accurate shape or to clean up the lines between cuts. quite the most inspirational model building I've ever seen.

(if I could only hit a tenth of the quality in the time I have available) Stealth Pilot

Oh, no special projects are at hand, but I've made a jewelry box with a glass-pane lid, and replaced some decorative cuts in the glass in my front door. Most of my glass cutting was done a lot time ago, when I made the glass display shelves for my parent's store.

-- Ed Huntress

Thanks, Ed. Curiosity had the better of me. My mind had drifted to working leaded glass.

Harold