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Removing Brazed/Bonded Carbide Inserts for Scrap

aj694122

Plastic
Joined
Feb 25, 2020
Help, I need to remove A LOT of Carbide Tips from HSS to get $$. Just a lonely Scrapper without a shop to utilize. Any Tips are greatly appreciated. Thank You!
 
I've never done a lot at a time, but I'm thinking a fixed OA torch, the steel held with pliers in one hand and a steel poker in the other to push the carbide off. You better check the price of braze coated carbide first. You may not make enough to buy your oxygen and acetylene.
 
I agree with gbent, sounds an expensive way to make money.

BUT (cos there's always one of them ;-) ) if it HAS to be done I'd use something like a gas or charcoal barbeque to pre heat the tools so each is only seconds under the OA flame.,
 
Last I heard clean carbide inserts/solid cutters were around $3 a lb,so Id be thinking there s gotta be a better way to make a buck.........no way you can heat anything with oxy/acet and not go broke ,and I suspect due to the oversupply of scrap of all kinds ,buyers would be very picky about any kind of contamination...Just my few cents worth ...........but here s a funny thing,I been trying to find someone to erect a front fence for me ,and latest quote was (and I quote) Naaaaaaaah mate ,I dont get outta bed for a small job like that ....
 
I certainly appreciate Your advice, sorry about your contractor, sounds like he's on the fence about taking Your job.
 
I wonder if you can pickup a induction heater from a surplus place like Govbid or like then you just have to run it off electricity.
No gas tanks to haul and swap, quick.Need to size it correctly, overkill is better than too small.
If your selling it go straight to a tool maker with a furnace who can melt it who makes tools rather than trying to go to a merchant who on sells

Its a good thing to recycle things properly and efficiently.
 
If your selling it go straight to a tool maker with a furnace who can melt it who makes tools rather than trying to go to a merchant who on sells
Scrap carbide recycling is bit more complicated than just melting it to a lump and making more tools. Probably not too many companies who do it and they don’t necessarily qant to deal with small scrap lots.

Oxy-propane for heating? Way cheaper than acetylene. Yet I still think its not profitable unless you got some speciality tooling with huge carbide inserts.
 
I've never done a lot at a time, but I'm thinking a fixed OA torch, the steel held with pliers in one hand and a steel poker in the other to push the carbide off. You better check the price of braze coated carbide first. You may not make enough to buy your oxygen and acetylene.

I think scrappers would balk at anything other than clean carbide..so some grinding off braze might be required to get best price...by hand because it gets hot perhaps 2 minuets per insert. At $10.00 an hour that would be over 25 cents each.

carbide around $3.00/3.50 a pound.
Michigan Scrap Metal Prices - USA

How many average inserts per one pound?
 
$3 a pound? What caused it to drop so much? I would think the demand on that hasn't changed much since I got $9 a pound a couple years ago. As for the OP, what about using a gas fired kiln? It doesn't take much heat to melt that brazing.
 
Back in '05 I built an automated de-tipper for Tru-Cut Saw. They would get over run with scrap circular saw blades and have two guys with a torch and a chunk of round stock knocking the carbide tips off. They'd be down on their haunches all day doing this. Yikes!
I mounted a blade tower and a Dayton gear drive motor on a plate. put an adjustable advance on it, a slide for bigger/smaller blades, torch holder and all sorts of adjusters. Worked like a champ all day, every day for years. Still does, but the price is down too low, so they scrap the whole blade...tips and all. If it's blades you're doing I'll ask if they'd sell it.
Short story about that. It was on a bench so the tips could slide down a chute and into a bucket. They filled the bucket but couldn't budge it. Tried to lift with a forklift and pulled the handle off. Supposedly there was more than 800 pounds in it.
 
$3 a pound? What caused it to drop so much? I would think the demand on that hasn't changed much since I got $9 a pound a couple years ago. As for the OP, what about using a gas fired kiln? It doesn't take much heat to melt that brazing.

I think my guy told me $10/lb about 6 months ago.
 
The only way I can see this making any money is a charcoal forge with a homemade bellows. Auto brake drums make great small forges.

Blacksmiths used to braze using a forge so it definitely can get hot enough. Heat with tip on top, grab with tongs, flip upside down and knock into steel tray to dislodge carbide.
 
$3 a pound? What caused it to drop so much? I would think the demand on that hasn't changed much since I got $9 a pound a couple years ago. As for the OP, what about using a gas fired kiln? It doesn't take much heat to melt that brazing.

I think my guy told me $10/lb about 6 months ago.

None of the 3 local scrap yards here take carbide, that was a price I got from a place I shipped it to that was out of state and mentioned in a discussion about scrap carbide here on PM. I do not remember the name of the place.
 
Not sure where you are in Michigan, but I will match any buyer in Michigan on brazed carbide scrap and pay cash.

As to detipping.

Some brazed inserts are just not worth the trouble. But some are.

First, safety...make sure you are using ventilation. There's a good chance the braze has cadmium in it, and it will vapor off at melt temp, so you need air moving away from you. This is very important. Otherwise you'll start tasting metal after a couple days of doing it constantly.

The cheapest way to do it is with a forced air bellows forge fed with coal. I load a shitload of them in, heat it, then pull them out with tongs, pop off my carbide into one water bucket (made of metal) and pop the steel into the other water bucket (again, made of steel).

The second best way to do it is a small insulating fire brick forge. Again, you load a pile in, let it heat to red, and start pulling them out. My forge was small enough that I heated it with oxy/propane cutting torch just blowing through a hole.

Third is direct heat from rosebud. Least favorite. Slow.

Fourth is induction heater. Works pretty good and is clean, but is still slow. You really want to get volume heating.

You can make pretty good money doing it, if the price of carbide is reasonable. Last I knew it was $5/lb for clean inserts...and brazed is always a buck or so under clean....it's honestly hard to do more than about ten pounds of carbide an hour without really setting it up clean and organized. That's on tool bits that are 20-25% carbide by weight percentage, but the chunk of carbide weighing a third of an ounce or so.

If you get good at it, let me know...I've got a few thousand pounds of it saved up for a rainy day/month.
 
Never looked into it but if I was trying to separate them I would be looking into what the melting points are. Fishing inserts out of the bottom of a ladle and then cleaning them in acid or some other solution to remove the wetted metal (assuming the steel would wet to hot carbide, I don't know what it would do) sounds like a lot less work to me. I'm sure there is some type of process developed that involves minimal labor.
 








 
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