How Long Will It Take To Produce carbide rods?

As a manufacturer of tungsten carbide rods, we always receive several questions like, “why does it take such a long time to produce carbide rods?”. This article is to give you the answer, and we will take examples of producing 200kg carbide round bars.

Process of producing tungsten carbide rods

A. Prepare the raw material

Usually, the purchasing department will purchase and store high-quality tungsten carbide powder and binder powder.

B. Mixing and wet milling: 48 hours

Tungsten carbide powder and binder powder will be mixed and milled with water and ethanol in the ball milling machine. To mill them sufficiently and achieve the ideal grain size, the ball milling machine will keep milling for about 2 days.

C. Spray drying: 24 hours

After wet milling, the tungsten carbide powder slurry drys up in a spray dry tower for 24 hours. Only when the spray drying evaporates the water in the tungsten carbide powder can the pressing and sintering be finished better.

D. Compacting: extrusion 228 hours;dry-bag isostatic pressing 36 hours (including releasing interior stress and drying)

The two main methods of shaping are extrusion and dry-bag isostatic pressing. These two methods will cost different periods. The extrusion will cost 12 hours to compact, and the dry-bag isostatic pressing will cost 8 hours. During the pressing, the forming agent is added during extrusion, while the dry-bag isostatic pressing doesn’t need the forming agent. 

After pressing, the compacted rods need to release the interior stress under a constant temperature and humidity environment. This process can avoid cracks in the following process. Tungsten carbide compacted rods will spend a long time releasing interior stress, 144 hours for extrusion, and 24 hours for the dry-bag isostatic pressing. Then tungsten carbide compacted rods, after extrusion, will be put into the drying oven for 73 hours, and the rods after the dry-bag isostatic pressing for only 4 hours.

Although the dry-bag isostatic pressing will cost less time than extrusion, it can only apply to manufacturing larger rods with a diameter of more than 16mm.

E. Sintering: 24 hours

Tungsten carbide compacted rods will be sintered in the vacuum furnace. This process will last for about 24 hours. After sintering, the tungsten carbide rod blanks need to grind and inspected.

To sum up, the main process for producing 200kg tungsten carbide rod blanks will cost about 324 hours (13.5 days) for extrusion and about 132 hours (5.5 days) for the dry-bag isostatic pressing, not to mention the time spending in grinding and so on.

However, with sufficient stock, you don’t have to worry about the delivery time. We can ship it in 3 days. If you are interested in tungsten carbide products and want more information and details, you can CONTACT US by phone or mail at the left, or SEND US MAIL at the bottom of the page.