Help me to use my Proxxon rotary tool

[Squelchtone]

So I am currently taking advantage of my school break to make a set of picks out of hacksaw blades.

I don't have a bench grinder to quickly grind it down. I purchased a grinding head for rotary tool but it doesn't make any headway into the carbon steel. Standard cut off wheel is slow as sin. Will buy a different wheel speed things up? I see fiber cut off wheels and diamond wheels, is that what I need?

MA

[averagejoe]

I would personally recommend using a tungsten carbide CUTTER. Do not mix them up with carbide burrs.

The cutters produce less heat and work better than most of the cutoff wheels, not to mention last a lot longer.

[raimundo]

If your doing this with a high rpm dremel or knockoff, be sure to wear eye protection, sometimes they get hot and can break off and launch .
Have you tried any files,they work very well for the finish work you can control the cut much better than with a power tool

[MrAngry]

I would personally recommend using a tungsten carbide CUTTER. Do not mix them up with carbide burrs.

The cutters produce less heat and work better than most of the cutoff wheels, not to mention last a lot longer.

Are you trolling? I went and bought a tungsten carbide cutter and it performed much worse than the cut-off.

I ended up just using standard cut-off wheel, once I got more practice, I could make the pick in about 20 minutes.

[Squelchtone]

Are you trolling?

averagejoe is a good member of this community, he wouldn't pull your leg or lead you down the wrong path.

What worked well for him, may not work well for you and vise versa. Chalk this up to the old forum signature line "your mileage may vary"

Squelchtone

[averagejoe]

Are you trolling?

averagejoe is a good member of this community, he wouldn't pull your leg or lead you down the wrong path.

What worked well for him, may not work well for you and vise versa. Chalk this up to the old forum signature line "your mileage may vary"

Squelchtone

Thanks for sticking up Squelchtone.

I recommended a cutter since they work well and do not wear out (if they ever do) at the rate of wheel/discs etc.

Of course the discs work faster, and they do have their place when they work better for certain things. You can just go and cut along the lines so to speak. BUT they wear out fairly quickly, and generate LOTS of heat. You have to quench it the workpiece every few seconds. Using a TC cutter I can go for minutes sometimes and it will not get too hot. I have used lots of discs, but still am on my original cutter.

Another point of this would be the quality of what you buy. If you but the stuff that China ships over here because it is so bad they wont use it themselves, you wont get the expected results. This is where you really get what you pay for.

Take for instance when I was fitting an Abloy protec KIK into my S&G 833c padlock. I needed to cut down a hardened steel bolt to make the correct tailpiece. Using a wheel to cut off the bolt was fine, but shaving off material is where the carbide bits shone. They literally made the steel shavings fly and gave a smoother finish to the final piece. I tried with discs but got fed up after using 4 of them just to take the corners off of the bolt head.

[MrAngry]

Maybe you can help identify why my experience was poor then. I tried the tungsten carbide cutter and even after 30 seconds of me pushing sort of hard on the bit, it barely made a mark on the hacksaw blade. Is it possibly an RPM thing? My tool only goes up to 20K, maybe it has nonlinear improvement with RPM.

But cut-off wheels are ~$5 for 20, in making one pick I used only one of them and its diameter did not shrink much from the exertion. The tungsten carbide cutter I got was Dremel brand so I would think it's fair quality, although reviews on Amazon aren't stellar.

[averagejoe]

I find it helps if you dont push really hard. Tilt the workpiece to 45 degrees, or even a bit more as this allows more of the surface to contact the cutter. Then move down the piece against the rotation of the cutter. If the cutter is turning the same way as you are moving it, they dont work as well.

You cannot use them like cutter discs and let it sit in one place, you have to move them for best results.

Which kind of discs were you using? Last time I made a pick from a hacksaw blades, I used the red dremel ones and used around 4-5.

Hope this helps.