At the core of your business are the tools and equipment that you could scarcely do without. These tools include diamond bridge saw blades, diamond angle grinder blades and diamond core drills.
They are the essentials that keep your business running and a huge part of maintaining their effectiveness is keeping them in cut-ready condition!
That’s where our Abrasive Sharpening Blocks come into their own – they’re made of an incredibly hard, abrasive material that exposes the diamond within the tools bond, keeping it at the peak of cutting performance.
Back to Basics: Using Diamonds to Cut Stone
Before we talk too much about diamond sharpening blocks, let’s start at the beginning. Right at the beginning.
When we talk about using diamond tools to ‘cut’ stone, what’s actually happening is the stone is being ground away.
Remember: diamond blades don’t cut at all – they grind!
Diamond is a superhard material. In fact, diamond is the hardest known material to have been tested using the industry standardised way, the Vickers hardness test.
This hardness is put to good use in diamond tools as the diamond grinds away the stone being processed into a fine powder, effectively ‘cutting’ it away. The diamonds do all of the ‘cutting’ work and they are held in place within the tools bond.
Diamond Blades: The Science Behind The Technology is a post where we look at the composition of diamond blades.
That said, despite the incredible natural hardness of diamond, it’s not indestructible.
During tens and hundreds of thousands of passes over the stone, the exposed diamond starts to crack and the tools bond starts to wear away. Eventually, both the diamond and bond ware to a point at which it dislodges from the blade and is swept away with the material being cut.
This is a controlled process and as both the diamond and the bond wares away, this erosion exposes new diamond which takes over the grinding. However, excess heat generated by the grinding process can hinder this.
When diamond experiences temperates in excess of 800°C it starts to oxidise – often referred to informally as ‘glazing over’ when it happens in an industrial environment.
Diamond Tools Glazing Over
Excess heat is never good when cutting stone. It can damage the tool and produces a poor quality cut, not to mention that it can damage the stone surface itself due to chipping.
When the diamond within the tools bond oxidises it loses much of its grinding power, resulting in the stone being ineffectively ground away, if at all. As the tool continues to run it generates further friction and heat.
Effective Cutting Using Abrasive Sharpening Blocks
Sharpening blocks for diamond tools work by consisting of an incredibly abrasive material to actively expose more diamond within the tools bond.
If a tool has ‘glazed over’, the abrasive power of a sharpening block breaks down the bond around the oxidised diamond and re-exposes the new, sharp diamonds to effectively grind the stone, breathing new life into the tool.
Ensuring your diamond tools are at optimal sharpness is key in achieving a fast, clean and efficient cut through granite and quartz, but for tools for ultra-compact surfaces like DEKTON, sharpening your equipment is essential!
Cosentino has accredited our Abrasive Sharpening Block specifically for use with DEKTON cutting tools to ensure that they produce the desired cut. This action also helps to prolong the life of the tool as ultra-compact surfaces are so dense that even with the specialist equipment they can prove a challenge to fabricate.
