Development of a High-Speed Manufacturing Method of an Electroplated Diamond Wire Tool.

Abstract

Multi-wire sawing with loose abrasives is widely employed for slicing brittle materials, but the process has problems in the viewpoint of inefficiency and bad working environment. Therefore, fixed-abrasive wire sawing processes have been introduced by using a resinoid diamond wire tool or an electroplated diamond wire tool to overcome these problems. Electroplated diamond wire tools have higher wear resistance, but the production cost is very high because the time required for electroplating in the manufacturing process is too long. As a result, the tools cannot be put to practical use. In this study, ultra high-speed electroplating using felt brush is proposed to adopt for manufacturing the tools in order to reduce the production cost. A series of experiment revealed that a production speed of a newly developed method is 30 times higher than that of conventional manufacturing method and a developed wire tool has a high wear resistance as compared with commercial wire tool.