Tooling for turning titanium carbide

Hello everyone,

A little bit of background. At the shop where I am employed, most of the work we do comes from various steel mills. A portion of this work is redressing the profiles of worn guide rolls from the mills. Most of these rolls are 58-60 Rc D2 or D7 steel. For these rolls we use ceramic inserts and they work very well.

However, occasionally we receive small rolls (1.5”- 2.25” OD by 1.5” long)made of titanium carbide that need to be re-dressed. The prints call out a hardness of 70-72 Rc. We rough out the wear with one corner and get one finish pass out of another before it starts to degrade. Sometimes the insert can be seen breaking down towards the end of the pass on the larger rolls. This is the case regardless of what the speeds and feeds are. This system is far from ideal, but serviceable. Grinding on the lathe is not an option.

My question is this. Is there a more suitable insert material that may better suit this task? Diamond coated inserts perhaps? I don’t know how the rolls are manufactured to begin with and google is not much help in this area. Any advice is appreciated.

Maybe PCD inserts would do the trick. Or find a grinding shop to sub it out to.

Pcd would probably work. I sell a PCD variant called CVD-D which is touted as tooling for carbide machining. PH Horn makes turning inserts, ID boring inserts, mills & drills tipped with this material.

Ultra-Hard Cutting Materials >> Horn USA, Inc. - EXCELLENCE IN TECHNOLOGY

Thank you both for the info. I will look into PCD and CVD-D.

Let me know if you need a source. I know a guy

Okay so 70-72 Rc. Basically off the end of the scale so the number is just this side of worthless.
Titanium carbide and tungsten carbide are different animals so lets not mix them as the same.
"machinable" carbides have a high cobalt content and reasonable grain size. None of which known here.
PCD is the best bet particularity since you can actually cut this material with ceramic at all and as such I question the composition.
Tic is added to Wc to make steel cutting grades. To over simply it is basically harder but very brittle.
A wheel or part made of lots of TiC would be a cermet or a C8 carbide.
Bob

How about greenleaf wisker reinforced ceramics ?
"The manufacture of rolls for use in steel making is an area where machinability has been decreased significantly by the introduction of alloyed materials, especially chromium content. In addition, the use of forged rolls is increasing, and centrifugally cast products with high hardness levels and surface contamination are another challenge.

Ceramic cutting tools such as Greenleaf's GEM-7™ composite material and WG-300® whiskered material are finding an important place in heavy turning when combined with rigid, well-designed holding systems."

Greenleaf Global Support - Heavy Turning Inserts - Category


http://www.greenleafglobalsupport.com/wcsstore/Greenleaf/upload/docs/TBCarbideAndCeramicAppRange.pdf