Straight Cuts of a Different Kind :)

Straight cuts of a different kind starts by combining electricity with a brass wire (EDM) to mill metal with the kind of precision impossible to achieve by traditional means.

Traditional milling involves the mechanical shaping of a material—“applying a mechanical force against the workpiece to physically make a chip or remove material,” says Brian Pfluger, EDM product line manager at Makino, a machine tool maker. “Whereas with EDM we're not physically touching the part—we're machining with lightning bolts.”

First of all, that’s metal as hell. But more specifically, we’re talking lots and lots of little sparks. The “blade” in an EDM machine is actually a superfine brass wire through which electricity courses. Even though the machine is cutting through extremely tough materials, such as carbide (which is so tough that traditional milling techniques use it to drill through other materials), the blasts of electricity it uses are relatively weak. But the blasts come with extremely high frequency, something like 20,000 sparks per second along the length of the brass wire.

Some specifics ...

The wire itself never actually touches the material. The rapid-fire sparks vaporize teeny tiny bits of the metal being cut, on the order of 5 microns wide. (A micron is a millionth of a meter. For context, a red blood cell in your body is between 6 and 8 microns wide.) This is known as sublimation.

1 Wire. 2 Electrical discharge erosion (Electric arc). 3 Electrical potential. 4 Workpiece.

Cool without question. :)