The Diamonds Suck website is the perfect antitode to the news that the Diamond industry has successfully halted the plunge in the fundamentally worthless stones' retail price.
Depends on the tooling you're going for. Synthetic diamonds are great for creating abrasives, which makes up the majority of industrial diamond tools.
But for a lot of machining where you need a large cutting head, industrial diamonds are a little too small. I think most synthetic diamonds are less than a millimeter in diameter. They can be made larger, but they take a long time and aren't very cost effective.
The vast majority of diamonds mined are industrial grade, especially the larger ones. So you end up using a bit of both depending on your application.
I saw that as well, but I think cut hardness must be jewelers terminology. As far as actual hardness diamonds are a 10 on the mohs scale, moissanite is a 9.25, and tungsten carbide is usually around 9-9.5.
While I agree we shouldn't be using them for jewelry, diamonds are factually very important and incredibly valuable to manufacturing.
They're the only thing hard enough to cut and shape tungsten carbide, which is instrumental in basically any complex machinery work.
the ones in tools are man made and they're a lot cheaper to buy
Depends on the tooling you're going for. Synthetic diamonds are great for creating abrasives, which makes up the majority of industrial diamond tools.
But for a lot of machining where you need a large cutting head, industrial diamonds are a little too small. I think most synthetic diamonds are less than a millimeter in diameter. They can be made larger, but they take a long time and aren't very cost effective.
The vast majority of diamonds mined are industrial grade, especially the larger ones. So you end up using a bit of both depending on your application.
Interestingly, moissanite (per the source referenced by the article) exceed diamonds in hardness ("toughness") as well.
I saw that as well, but I think cut hardness must be jewelers terminology. As far as actual hardness diamonds are a 10 on the mohs scale, moissanite is a 9.25, and tungsten carbide is usually around 9-9.5.