Consumables for cutting applications

As a rule, the folowing principle applies:

• For hard materials, a cut-off wheel with soft bond is recommended.
  This ensures fast breaking out of worn abrasive particles.
   
• For medium-hard materials, a cut-off wheel with a medium-hard bond is recommended.
  This ensures worn abrasive particles break out evenly.
   
• For soft materials, a cut-off wheel with hard bond is recommended.
  This ensures slow breaking out of worn abrasive particles.

The process of cutting, specifically wet abrasive cutting, is essential for materialographic sectioning of samples. In this process, cut-off wheels of different material thicknesses, abrasive particles and bonds are used on a corresponding wet abrasive cutting machine. These bond types can be synthetic resin, rubber, or metal. For the abrasives, aluminum oxide, silicon carbide, diamond or CBN is used. These abrasive particles are enclosed in a bond matrix.