Vaporizing saw: General Industry Coverage

Sawing exotic materials, such as high-temperature superalloys, as well as hardened materials, can prove problematic. “You can eat teeth for lunch on that bandsaw blade trying to cut them,” said Curtis Reichhold. He’s president of Electrical Discharge Saws Inc., a supplier of electrical discharge saws that is working on commercializing an attachment for a manual lathe that turns the machine into an EDS.

Instead of buying a dedicated EDS, which costs about $225,000, the EDS attachment will sell for considerably less, according to Reichhold. “The majority of job shops have a manual lathe they can take and make it a superhardened- or exotic-material slicer,” he said, noting, however, that the company has to analyze each application with a customer before proceeding.

The attachment bolts onto a lathe’s ways and erodes electrically conductive material with a rotating ¾ “-high × 0.032 “-thick blade while the workpiece rotates as well. “Because of the expense of exotic materials, we try to keep blade thickness to a minimum,” he said, noting this minimizes waste.

Reichhold emphasized that the EDS blade cuts cleanly, produces a heat-affected zone of only about 0.002 ” deep and doesn’t workharden the material.