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scrap diamond?

David Carlisi

Stainless
Joined
Nov 12, 2007
Location
Alpharetta, Ga USA
I'm running a job right now for a customer that uses lots of diamond wheels to cut ceramic tile. There are 20 of them, 12 inches diameter, 1/8 thick. I am cutting the diamond part off because he wants to use the plates as shims for his new machines. The drops are pieces about 2 inches long because the blades are slotted. Is there any scrap value in used diamonds?
 
Diamond blades and drills are tipped with synthetic diamonds nowadays. The discs for large blades are made from some kind of high-grade steel (very tough and springy) but the spent teeth are pretty-much worthless.
 
At a previous job, they recovered diamonds from both segmented and continuous rim blades. Older segmented blades were brazed, later ones were laser welded. I don't know the scrap value, but 20 blades probably isn't worth much. Keep a few around for dressing wheels like Peter said.
Robert
 
Thanks for the responses. This was as I suspected, but the word diamond always makes me think something is valuable. A few will go in my tool box and the rest into the dumpster. The wheels were made in Italy, and I am sure that my customer paid through the nose for them.
 
Out here in seismically active California we have what we called Lake County Diamonds. There are certain places on a 5000’ mountain (an old extinct volcano), where you can walk along picking up industrial grade diamonds.

Used to be some where to sell them as I remember as a kid folks would go along finding them to sell.
 
Thanks for the responses. This was as I suspected, but the word diamond always makes me think something is valuable. A few will go in my tool box and the rest into the dumpster. The wheels were made in Italy, and I am sure that my customer paid through the nose for them.

Not sure what your pricing over there is like but I guess they ought to be around a $1.50 for every mm diameter of blade. The very large blades are more per mm.
 
Ball-park price for what I'd expect a blade to cost over there. The prices do vary a lot according to quality etc, as with any tool.
 
Diamond is a crystaline form of carbon.

Industrial diamonds are grown as a polycrystal as distinguished from a single crystal.

These PCDs are grown on a base subtrate about 3" im diameter and about $1000 per disk. Llittle hunks are EDMed from the disk and bonded to a base tool element.

Salvage value is nil other than uses described above.

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Are you involved in the manufacturing process gar? I live at the other end of the chain - I cut concrete for a living. Here's a 300-ton chunk of concrete jetty I sawed off with electroplated diamond sawing wire and a shot of the wire in action cutting a concrete-filled steel leg:
 

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Peter.

No.

Our local SME chapter just had a plant tour of Unimerco where I saw these diamond disks and the cutting of.

Unimerco holds their tool sizes to within +/- 2 microns (+/- 80 millionths). The entire plant temperature is held within +/-1 deg F, and the air is very clean.

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