Loading... Please wait...Polycrystalline Diamond Series 10in x 6T , Popular Tools PRD106
Specifications:
Diameter: 10in
Teeth: 6T
Bore: 5/8in
Kerf: .094in
Plate: .071in
Anybody can get a piece of steel, braze some odd carbide on it and call it a saw blade. Making a really good saw blade is incredibly complex. There are about eight special kinds of steel for saw blades.They come from either Europe or Japan. If you want to buy some the minimum order is 100 tons at a time or 200,000 pounds. You have to buy it in flat sheets, which adds to the cost because buying it in rolls is cheaper. If it has been rolled then it will always have a tendency to roll back up and you want saw blades that are going to stay flat.
There are roughly 15,000 grades of tungsten carbide and you want to grade of carbide that's going to be right for the saw's application.
There are about a dozen different things you can add the tungsten carbide to improve the performance. However each of these grades also has a downside. Then you get into how the tungsten carbide is made.
Just as some people are better cooks than others so also some people just make tungsten carbide better than others. What is really bad is that some companies are good one day and not so good the next so you have to be careful and test each batch and only use the good ones.
The steel saw plate cannot be punched out but has to be laser cut. Punching will distort the edges. You can cut it with a waterjet but there is too much spread. Once a plate is been laser cut need to go back and remove the heat affected zone on the edges of the saw blade so it will braze properly.
The saw plate has to be heat treated then hammered for perfect flatness. It has to be tension rolled so that it will have enough stiffness but still be resilient enough.
There are about six different kinds of braze alloy. The kind of braze alloy used determines how well the tips will stay on and how well the tips will survive under impact.
Saw blade tips are ground on precision CNC machines. The best ones run about $500,000 to $750,000. If you visit a major manufacturing plant you will see Rows of these machines lined up.
The wheels used to grind the carbide are specifically designed for that application. Top-quality manufacturers are so fussy that even the size and shape of the crystal structure of the diamond is important.