Shaping Diamond for Industrial Tools
Both manufactured (polycrystalline) and natural diamonds are finding an ever-increasing variety of industrial uses in such applications as drawing wire, extruding fibers, cutting hard-to-machine materials and producing precision surgical instruments. Shaping the raw diamond material into usable tools has not been easy, though, because of its natural hardness.
The main processes used to machine diamond-based materials into their final shapes are electro-discharge machining and lasers. The...
Photonics Spectra, July 2003