Hard Facts About the Hardest Cutting Tools

Diamond and CBN cutting tools are powerful weapons, but when and how should they be used? Two things everyone knows about diamonds: they’re very hard and they’re very expensive. And so it is with polycrystalline diamond (PCD) as well as cubic boron nitride (CBN) cutting tools. They’re hard enough to cut extremely difficult-to-machine materials—but at a cost that has kept them as a tool of last resort in most cases, used only when there is no better, cheaper, solution.