Steps in Custom Blade Design
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To create a blade from metal, it first undergoes a heat treatment process, which hardens it and makes it more durable. Coatings may also be applied to increase resistance against wear and corrosion.
Design
Designing an industrial blade requires extensive knowledge and research of its requirements as well as cutting-edge design tools. This process includes steps like conceptualization, prototyping, and setting dimensional tolerances before considering suitable materials and coatings for your application.
Step one of designing a custom blade involves determining its intended use with a computer-aided design program such as Autodesk Inventor or Rhino. This ensures that it will meet customer specifications exactly.
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Materials
Selecting an ideal blade material is essential when creating custom knives. Different materials offer differing levels of strength, flexibility, and wear resistance as well as cost efficiency; your decision will ultimately depend on your industry and the cutting tasks you will be performing.
Steel is the go-to material for industrial blades, often enhanced with elements to improve performance. Carbon adds hardness, while chromium and molybdenum add corrosion resistance.
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Heat Treatment
Once your initial design is complete, the next step in making a blade will be choosing materials for construction. The choice of materials should reflect both the intended usage and the personal taste of the maker of the blade.
Once your raw materials have been assembled, the next step should be heating them and forging your knife shape. There are multiple approaches to forging, but forging requires precise control over temperatures and an understanding of how steel reacts.
After forging, heat treating of the blade follows. This four-step process hardens steel so it’s durable enough to withstand daily use, with each step keeping an exact temperature for a predetermined amount of time before cooling at a specific rate. Although challenging, following these protocols ensures your new blade has both hardness and flexibility to endure everyday use.
Grinding
Grinding is a metalworking machining process that utilizes an abrasive wheel as the cutting tool. Each grain on the wheel acts like a single-point cutting edge to chip away tiny chips of metal from your workpiece. Grinding is one of the more effective cutting processes as it quickly “hogs out” material while still producing fine finishes and accurate dimensions.
The grind of a knife is more than just a mechanical step in its creation; it is an art and science that determines its functionality and soul. A proper grind enables a blade to cut efficiently while keeping its edge sharp throughout its lifespan and withstanding even harsh use.
Custom industrial blades can benefit from additional surface treatments and coatings that reduce friction, harden the blade surface, and increase corrosion resistance – this can improve performance while simultaneously saving customers money in terms of both materials and labor costs.
Coating
Industrial blades can benefit from being coated with various forms of protective coatings that reduce friction, provide anti-reflective surfaces, and offer increased corrosion resistance – to name but a few benefits. By choosing an appropriate coating solution tailored specifically for you, an industrial blade’s service life and overall productivity may increase significantly, ultimately increasing productivity levels significantly.
Some of the most widely used industrial blade coatings include tungsten carbide, chromium, titanium nitride, DLC (Diamond-like carbon), and perylene. While costly, these blade coatings add significant longevity while reducing maintenance work requirements for knives.
Notably, coating choice does not directly determine blade sharpness; instead, this factor is determined by edge geometry, honing process, and regular maintenance practices.
Bluing can provide an economical solution to create corrosion-resistant steel blades, though only as a temporary measure for touch-ups; for the entire blade, it should only be applied if necessary. PVD, the physical vapor deposition process used on titanium alloys, carbide, and aluminum, provides more even coverage and produces a hard-wearing surface than electroplating does – often providing tough, lustrous finishes with increased wear resistance than electroplating does.