Cutting steel and other manly materials part 1

I've more or less moved in to my new place in Rochester and today will only be my third day of work at Klein Steel. The first two days were a whirlwind of meeting people, filling out paper work, and touring Klein Steel, its branches, and an unaffiliated cutting center.

While Klein specializes in cutting big pieces of steel intended for medium to large items such as plow and truck parts, industrial mixers, and many more uses I will surely soon learn, the other cutting center I visited cuts small to very small parts such as motorcycle components or the little gears in a watch or camera. Did you ever wonder where those tiny gears come from? I saw the answer first hand.

From the outside the building appeared quiet and unassuming, but inside forklifts transferred materials and a giant (30 feet tall) pneumatic press like the one that killed Arnold in Terminator 1 thumped steadily. I could see inch thick pieces of steel bent like blades of grass.

Past the motorcycle parts and metal pieces for fire-arms, in a quieter, cramped section of the building the machine that cut the itty-bitty pieces hummed away. The tiny parts are cut by, of all things, a thin brass wire with a high amp current running through it. The brass wire is constantly spooled as the expensive machine, a little larger than a refrigerator, guides the cutting to accuracies within two-ten thousandths (2/10000) of an inch! As many of us know from high school band, a small change in air temperature will change the thickness of most materials far more than that.

This unique cutting method takes place in a vat of de-ionized water to ensure that the current stays in the brass wire. Pure water is actually a strong insulator. It doesn't conduct electricity! Small amounts of minerals or impurities that exist in even the purest drinking water do, however, conduct electricity. That's why you shouldn't take showers during lightning storms.

Unlike most metal cutting processes, Electrical Discharge Machining, or EDM, won't burn the material it cuts, which is essential in order to cut as accurately as it does.

Wikipedia states:

The EDM cutting tool is guided along the desired path very close to the work but it does not touch the piece. Consecutive sparks produce a series of micro-craters on the work piece and remove material along the cutting path by melting and vaporization. The particles are washed away by the continuously flushing dielectric fluid.

I'm still not 100% clear why the material being cut isn't getting burned. Wikipedia uses terms like "melting" and "vaporization". That sounds like hot heat to me. Please post an explanation if you have one.

This week I'm out on the warehouse floor at Klein. Hopefully I can learn about all kinds of methods of cutting steel including oxy-cutting, laser, plasma, and water jet (cutting metal with water, awesome!). After that, look forward to a post on taking video games to the next level with adaptive algorithms.

Other tags this item is listed under include: smartamusement,