Results on Diamondwood

Tommy-D

World's best B player...
Silver Member
> I cut the stick of Diamondwood in half today,and got it turned down to .876,perfect for finishing on my small Enco. Here is what I found.

It turned down quite nice at .050 per pass,then a final cut of .025. I turned it at 650 rpm,and used a feed rate of .0095 per revolution for the 2 big cuts,then .006 for the last. The single-point carbide tool worked well,even with no nose radius.

Man,this stuff STINKS. It reminded me of the smell of the phenolic when I turned a Red Circle cue ball into a rod for a ferrule blank.

Dust and chips are messy.

It's a lot closer to still being "wood" than I thought,I always envisioned it ribboning like a plastic from the vacuum treatment with resin.

Single-point threading it is a disaster,or at least it was for me. I'd take a scratch cut,take 3 cuts at .003 deep,and watch it come apart in chunks like maple. The threading tool I used was HSS,dead sharp,with plenty of rake and relief.

I tried threading it so I can make an oddball insert for one of my break cue shafts. The insert stripped out but left enough wood that the old insert still threads snugly into the shaft. When I screw the cue together,the joint pin starts backing it out. My plan was to make an insert at about .435 x 14,so it fit tight enough that there was still a mechanical bond,and trust Devcon 2 Ton to complete the repair. Now,I think I'm going to have to make a Delrin collet so I can chuck the shaft up in the lathe at school,bore/tap new threads,and fabricate a 1/2-13 insert. Tommy D.
 
If you want to do a thread on Diamond wood, I'm going to suggest 'live' tooling. A better mtrl. for a shaft insert would be linen phenolic rod.
The Diamond wood has no interlocking fabric and is subject to cracking or breaking.
 
Alex makes lots of j/b break cues out of the stuff and whn it gets cut with a router,it is the nastiest smelling dust ever.even worse than black phenolic.

KJ,good to know about the interlocking grain.he has had 3 of them strip,break or crack right at the jump joint;since then he puts phenolic collars.3 isn't bad considering hes has made over 100,but we couldn't figure out why they were doing it.the wood is so incredibly strong,you would think it could only break from abuse.thanks for the heads up.
 
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