hey i'm chris from make everything and today we are going to be talking about tungsten carbide
burs why you need them in the shop what they're good for and if you make furniture
with wood and steel you're definitely going to want to stay tuned for this one check it out
all right so you might be familiar with carbide burs but maybe not ones of this size
you can find them in a smaller size which would be used on like a dremel like this
in your local hardware store but these larger ones can be really really great for all sorts of metal
working if you saw my video about grinding inside corners you probably recognize the carbide burr
so right here we've got two different types we've got some double cut for steel and then
some single cut for aluminum and what i want to show you today is just how versatile something
like this can be in your metal shop especially if you're doing anything sculptural or anything
artistic where you need to sort of grind into areas that you can't get to with a sanding belt
or maybe something that you would normally do with a file so here are two different style of carbide
burr for different materials so what you've got here is a single cut aluminum bur which you can
see these very large gullets between the cutting flutes and that's to allow that aluminum to sort
of evacuate while you're cutting and then here you've got a double cut steel designed carbide
burr now these are a little more common and you've probably seen these before now if you've ever used
these on aluminum you'll notice that these flutes can get clogged up pretty badly and that's called
chip welding and once you weld the chip into these sometimes it can be really difficult to remove
if not impossible and you've actually got to burn that chip out so what i'm going to show you is a
couple of examples on how we can use these steel ones and then i'll show you just how much of a
difference it makes when you use these aluminum specific ones in a piece of aluminum now as far
as the tools that you need to use a carbide bur you've got a couple of options i always tend to
go with a cordless option if i can and these are both some cordless grinders that milwaukee
makes so this one is a quarter inch shank die grinder and this can use various different tools
and it's got four speeds here on the back and then a little bit of variable speed here in the trigger
so anytime you use a tool in a grinder you're always going to want to check the recommended
speed from the manufacturer just to make sure you don't burn it out prematurely something
that i think is a little more common in sort of the everyday shop is a dremel so a dremel
is just a brand name but it's also sort of the name of a tool you can call this
a rotary tool as well this one's also a cordless from milwaukee and it's also variable speed
and i really like using one of these with a carbide burr anytime i'm doing really fine
finish work to grind out inside welds or inside corners now you can get carbide birds in a ton
of different shapes and these shapes are very important for the work that you're going to
be able to do with them because if you've got a specific corner or a specific shape you're
trying to grind you can almost always find a carbide burr that will fit into that application
you've got these little straight shank ones and a very common shape is this sort of
rounded lobe shape which gets you in tight corners really well now a more common and much
less expensive option if you're looking for a die grinder is pneumatic tools now these are cheaper
to buy because they have no motor inside them but obviously you do need an airline and an air setup
to use these the benefit of tools like this is you traditionally get a lot higher rpm
which can be good for much smaller grinding and they're very very light but then again
you also have to worry about being hooked up to an airline so you're constantly going to be
limited by the airflow in your compressor and the length of your hose so while i do have these
and i do use them on occasion i typically always opt for something with a battery
that i can bring to and from a job site or to and from different areas of the shop and i don't have
to worry about being attached to anything all right so right here we've got a prime example
for use of a carbide bur so this is essentially a slot that i'm trying to make now i drilled
two half inch holes over on the drill press and they're pretty close to one another and if you've
ever tried to do this you know if you try to make these holes overlap the drill bit's just gonna
stick and usually the drill bit will break so if i wanted to do this with a file i'd have to get in
here with a file and i'd have to actually manually try to remove this whole bridge of material and
it's not very big but it's big enough where if you had to do a bunch of them it would really take a
lot of time this is a perfect application for a carbide burst we're going to be able to grind
out that material this is steel it's not hardened but this burr can cut i believe up to 45 rockwell
because it is so much harder than the material itself so i'm going to set this die grinder to
about the second available speed and then one of the big things to remember when you're using a
carbide bur is the little pieces of metal um the chips that it produces are like little slivers
they get in your skin they get on your clothes so i always try to wear long sleeves and i try
to wear pretty well covering gloves because i hate trying to get those little slivers out of my skin
so let me show you how quickly we can grind out that bridge
so just like that in under a minute i've been able to create
basically a one inch by half inch slot in this piece of 3 16 thick steel
so if you were working on a furniture project and you wanted a slot that a bolt could float in
this would be a perfect application for that now a little more of an extreme example is over
here we've got a much larger bridge to make a bigger slot and again we're going to use
the bur and i'll just show you how quickly we can remove that much material as well
so again in just about a minute i was able to grind all that away you'll notice when i was
grinding that there was a little bit of chatter that's just because i had so much of the cutter
engaging with the material if you're just grinding on the edge you don't really get that but you do
have to be careful and make sure you're holding on to your tool really really firmly just so it
doesn't chatter away and you can see these little chips developing these things are like the worst
chips in the metal shop they get in your skin and they are so difficult to get out so you definitely
want to be careful and i like to use compressed air to blow this stuff away and get it out of my
clothes before i go home for the day now a similar application in a furniture building environment is
when you have a tubular leg and you want to bolt it to a wooden top and you want a bolt to be able
to float in there this one's a little bit bigger because i drilled a 7 8 hole here but i just
want to show you that with these especially these longer quarter inch ones you can usually get down
to the bottom side of a piece of tubing if you have to in order to drill these out now i've made
conference tables and larger scale furniture where i've used this one by two tubing and being able
to make those slots can be super super helpful now something like this if you have a plasma
table or an iron worker you could actually punch these holes but you're not going to be able to do
that in a piece of tube so using a carbide burr is really going to help you accomplish something that
you couldn't do with any other tool unless you were to cut it with a plasma torch from both sides
you could again get in here with a file but that's going to be a lot of hand work
when i'm pretty sure we can accomplish it with this in under a minute once again
so super easy nice big slot that i could put a very large piece of hardware in with a washer
and i could very easily have a travel
inside there now this burr on the back side we could just take the grinder again and rip that off
so if you watched my video about grinding inside welds i talked about these curved flap
discs and these do a great job of getting inside those corners but another option is also again
to use a carbide burr you can get in there and grind those out really quickly and i
showed these in the video but i'll just show it again here since we're on the topic
super quick way to deal with an inside corner weld like that this will leave a
nice clean smooth finish you can get back in there if you want to make it perfect with a
file or some sandpaper but it's already super super smooth and it's a really nice transition
while we're looking at this piece of tubing we can also look at a different shaped bur
and we can actually take care of a surface weld like that using one of these rounded points
versus this little star versus this little cone these little cone ones are great because you
can get into tight areas but the rounded point on this will actually allow you to grind this
out so that you can get this down a little bit smoother if that's all you have
now i don't really find the carbide burr for that type of grinding very practical
but if you need some sort of clearance and you just need to grind away material quickly
i don't really think there's a better way than just using the ball end of one of these
and dragging it across now sometimes depending on your project you just need to gouge a half circle
in the end of a piece of tube even for clearance for a bolt
and something like this is difficult to do with a drill bit because if you try to drill on this
you're likely going to wander off to the side now again you could get in here with a file but a lot
faster way is with a burr now we're going to go the full size of this but if you had a smaller
carbide burr like one of these you could make the hole or this sort of slot whatever size you wanted
super fast and really really clean now i also mentioned being able to use a smaller tool like a
dremel with these so i'll show you real quick how you could use one of these in the same application
so you can see i was essentially able to make two different size steps
one with this larger bur and then again with the dremel which is such a small and common tool
you can easily grind away at this eighth inch thick tubing now one of the best things about
tungsten carbide burrs is their ability to cut hardened material so this is just
mild steel it's pretty soft but if you ever do anything that involves heat treating or if you
experiment with knife making you'll know that once you get your blade or your piece hardened
it's very difficult to do precise or even quick removal so with a tungsten carbide burr
a lot of times it's hard enough where it's harder than the material that you're cutting away
so anytime i'm working on a folding knife or a very small intricate piece i can use one
of these because they're so much harder than the material to grind away stuff they also work great
on stainless and titanium which a lot of other tools just don't touch but now going the opposite
direction with a softer material i'll show you how well these single flute aluminum specific carbide
burrs work on a nice big chunk of aluminum so here we've got a nice big piece of aluminum
and i'm just going to do some stock removal with these single cut aluminum specific burrs
so you can see with this lower flute count this thing just absolutely shreds through aluminum i
mean it's essentially like using an end mill but free hand and the applications for this
are really vast especially if you do anything sculptural or anything mechanical where parts
need to move against each other because if you need to make clearance or room you know grinding
aluminum with sandpaper or traditional kind of grinding discs is it always has a tendency
of clogging those up so if you can use this nice low flute count cutter you can really
remove material efficiently and quickly it is all over me and all over the shop but again you
want to be careful and wear gloves because these little shards will get in everywhere
all right so that's kind of a good example of the different ways that you can use a carbide burr
like i said they work incredibly well in mild steel and on aluminum when you use the correct
cutter design now they're a single cut and double cut for both steel and aluminum now when i'm doing
finish and fine work i like to use a single cut carbide burr because it just leaves a little bit
cleaner of an edge the double cuts remove material faster but they do require a little more cleanup
if you're trying to do something like you know really fine especially if you're doing knife
making you're probably going to want to get single cut and you're going to want something
that's definitely tungsten carbide so you don't have to worry about dulling it like you would if
you use high speed steel the carbide burrs that i used in this video were provided by my friends
over at faired abrasives they make an incredibly high quality set of carbide birds you can get
over on amazon i'll put some links down below and you can check them out these smaller burrs
for dremels they also make um you really just want to get whatever is going to work for
your application i personally like the eighth inch single cut burrs for doing knife making
and i really like the quarter inch burs with the rounded edge for when i'm doing metal working in
steel and i need to grind things away very quickly like i said you can get battery powered 120 volt
powered or pneumatic powered die grinders the burs generally don't care what they're in
but you cannot use these in like a cordless drill as much as it looks like you could they generally
don't have enough speed to work efficiently but once you have them in your arsenal i think you'll
use them a lot i really hope you enjoyed this little video i like bringing awareness of tools
like this to my viewers here on youtube because there are just so many different things in the
shop that i've learned how to use that just help me get my work done that much better and that much
faster time is money and i'm constantly looking for ways to cut down on my time by using better
tools and better processes so if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up and don't forget
to subscribe to my channel for more videos here in the shop more videos woodworking and metal
working and building cool stuff here and also if you like tool tip videos like this leave a comment
down below check out the links below on where you can get some of these tools and there will be some
other videos down there as well that'll talk more about inside corner grinding and some of the other
tool and shop process videos that i've made if you want to see what i'm doing on a day-to-day basis
follow me right here at make everything shop and if you're interested in seeing fair products in
person in action check out the catskill mountain maker camp this columbus day weekend in east
durham new york at the blackthorne resort uh it is a great maker event i will be there lots of
my friends will be there and i'll be bringing with me a ton of fair stuff to give away and show off
we'll have the inside corner grinding disc we'll have some sets of files some wire wheels we'll
have some carbide burrs they're going to be doing blacksmithing timber framing jimmy duress is going
to be demoing on a bandsaw we're going to be doing tons of awesome stuff tickets are still available
like i said me and my friends will be there answering questions and i'll be giving away a
ton of stuff from my friends that faired and some stuff from my friends over at lincoln electric so
check that out there'll be a link down below the catskill mountain maker camp the only maker event
of 2021 and it's going to be a blast so definitely come and check it out if you're in the northeast
i hope you enjoyed this video again i'm chris zeph for make everything i hope to see you on
the next one oh by the way everybody that sent me a nice message about the flood video
thank you i'm fine the shop is fine and if you're looking for ways to help find an organization in
louisiana or in new jersey or queens where there was devastation and donate your money there
i appreciate everyone's offer to kind of set up a gofundme and all these different things i didn't
lose anything and i don't want anyone to give me any money for something that i don't need donate
where it needs donate to one of these charities or shelters down in the gulf or like i said up
here in the northeast where the devastation was bad thank you all so much and i'll see you soon