Largest ever 718 nickel ingot sawn successfully

Steel stockholder Howco Materials Management, Sheffield has sawn what is believed to be the largest ever section of 718 nickel alloy.

The feat saw a 1,092 mm diameter ingot sawn on Howco's 17-year-old Kasto HBA 1060x1260 bandsaw fitted with a Wikus-supplied made-to-order carbide tipped blade Harrison Saw and Tool blade. And despite uncontrolled cooling having resulted in a large internal blow hole in one of the ingots, the application was successful.

The effect of the blow holes was to impose intermittent cutting conditions on the tips, which had the potential to shatter the carbide, added to which swarf trapped in the hole could have wedged itself between the blade and the material, resulting in tooth loss. A slow rate of infeed was therefore chosen, resulting in a 24-hour cycle time for cutting across the full diameter.

The need to undertake the mammoth sawing task was because a supplier's melting furnaces had gone down, leaving Howco with three huge ingots of unusable 718 nickel alloy whose annealing had not been controlled, rendering it potentially extremely hard and virtually impossible to cut.

There was no realistic way of recycling the high-value material without cutting the ingots into several smaller parts so that they could be returned to the furnace for remelting. Each ingot needed to be sawn first across its diameter. The halves were then placed flat on the table and sawn again into two D-shaped pieces. Nobody had ever sawn such a large section of this notoriously tough metal.

Author
Andrew Allcock

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