Tungsten Cutting Stylus

[Lee2023]

Hi,

Sharing results

Cutting stylus, not embossing, made of tungsten lapped and polished with diamond paste, I have done this to test my setup without the risk of damaging my diamond stylus, useful for testing chip extraction, lathe control, lathe sequences, audio level etc

At first relatively noisy, after 15 mins of cutting really noisy haha, I have added a layer of Kapton and installed a Nichrome wire to heat a bit the cutting stylus, it reduce a bit the evil noise but nothing grandiose, useful for testing the heating PSU and adjusting the management of static discharges that are making my control PIC crashing...

You can see the heated tip from all this cutting stress and the not as sharp and mirror tip as the rest, so diamonds are under a lot of stress !!

Tungsten is brittle and breaking under sharpening, you need to go with grit step by step, dremel not a good idea it overheat the tungsten, break sharp edges, diamond plates are the best, then lapping, then diamond paste on the Unimat lathe, there is some kind of limit reached by structure imperfections and this brittle thing at microscopic level, even with the best mirror finish they will not last very long with a low noise level cutting floor

New cheap HD microscopes are really better now in 2026 than two year ago, things are going fast

Enjoy