Okay so I have been researching this and it turns out that all carbide is brittle. Maybe aluminum oxide can fracture it because it is tougher than the carbide. Also in yarn factories the steel table that the the yarn is drawn over wears. Yarn is not as hard as steel. Some plastic parts are cut by water jet. Maybe the violence of the jet rips out plastic molecules, I don't know.
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- Thread starter yepimonfire
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Water jet cutters use an abrasive sand (like garnet) to do the cutting. The water itself is just the medium that carries it at high velocity in a focused stream, to do the cutting. If it were just pure water with no mineral content at all, it wouldn't work as such for cutting hard materials. Even tap water contains some mineral content, which would be abrasive enough to cut plastics & other soft materials at high, focused pressure. And the velocity itself plays more into the 'cutting' action - perfect example is a 'soft' lead bullet penetrating a much harder steel plate at high velocity.
And some ropes & other natural fibers are known to contain a high amount of silica (the same stuff sand and natural sharpening stones are made of), which is why such products induce wear on the machinery used in manufacturing.
And brittle carbides and brittle steels & glass, etc, can still be finely cut by materials harder and sharp enough to do so. This is what allows very fine abrasives like diamond to precisely shape, thin and polish an edge on a knife in a carbide-rich steel - all done at light pressure as used on a polishing strop, for example. And it will do that job better than an abrasive which is only capable of fracturing the carbides under pressure.
And some ropes & other natural fibers are known to contain a high amount of silica (the same stuff sand and natural sharpening stones are made of), which is why such products induce wear on the machinery used in manufacturing.
And brittle carbides and brittle steels & glass, etc, can still be finely cut by materials harder and sharp enough to do so. This is what allows very fine abrasives like diamond to precisely shape, thin and polish an edge on a knife in a carbide-rich steel - all done at light pressure as used on a polishing strop, for example. And it will do that job better than an abrasive which is only capable of fracturing the carbides under pressure.
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That is all true except they don't use abrasive in waterjets that cut plastic. I don't think aluminum oxide is ideal for refining carbides. I read an article about edge rolling in high vanadium steels. The author used cbn wheels and diamond stropping compound in on test and aluminum oxide as the grinding wheel (tormeks we're used in both tests) and aluminum oxide as the stropping compound. He even sharpened vanadis 10 on aluminum oxide (10v knockoff). The diamond/cbn edges were a bit sharper and exhibited greater durability. He speculated edge rolling was the culprit. Of course he sharpened at 12 degrees per side which I'm sure exacerbated the edge rolling. At 40 degree wedge of steel would be stronger obviously than a 24 degree one(I sharpen at 20dps). I'm definitely not saying it's ideal it's just that it works. Like I said before if I had blades in 90v or something like that I would probably buy the Naniwa diamond resin stones . I only use diamond plates for course sharpening as I have seen pictures from microscopes of broken carbides in edges and they claimed diamond plates were the culprit. And before anyone says aluminum oxide can't chip down a vanadium carbide a hammer can break a diamond (not cut just smash) and razors I have read get dull because the hair which isn't as hard as the steel by a factor of 50 chips it on a microscopic level when the hair is cut at an angle. So all I'm saying is I'm sure the guy who started this threads knife polished fine.