Manufacturing of CVD diamond micro-end mills with electrical discharge machining

At state of the art micro-milling tools made of cemented carbide are widely used in industry. Nevertheless, these micro-milling tools suffer from fast and random tool breakage while cutting. To improve the wear behaviour of micro-milling tools new cutting materials have to be established. In this work electrical discharge machining (EDM) for manufacturing of micro-milling tools with cutting edges made of boron doped chemical vapour deposition (bdCVD) diamond were investigated. Wire-EDM and die-sinking-EDM were compared regarding the characteristics of the micro-tool´s cutting edges. It could be concluded that the wire-EDM process is suitable for manufacturing of micro-milling tools with cutting edges made of bdCVD diamond. With respect to the elaborated technologies for the wire-EDM process a cutting edge radius rv = 3.9 mm and for the die-sinking-EDM process a cutting edge radius rv = 5.4 mm could be measured.