Cemented carbide tools and moulds for wear-resistant applications in Japan

Tools for metal cutting, mining, metal forming, woodworking, and other applications are made from cemented carbide owing to its hardness, strength, toughness, and rigidity. In Japan, cemented carbide tools that are not used as cutting or mining tools are considered wear-resistant and they are mainly used for plastic deformation but including some special parts. Wear-resistant tools have been developed with the properties required for new manufacturing methods. From 1970 to 2000, the challenge of producing can tooling components with high precision enhanced the production technology and performance of these tools in Japan. Developing highprecision wear-resistant tools resulted in preparing binderless and nano-grained cemented carbides. Using the latest cemented carbide with a coefficient of thermal expansion similar to that of glass led to the manufacture of a wear-resistant tool for the glass-lens moulding of microfluidics. This article presents cemented carbide for the specific applications that utilise wear-resistant tools, such as can tooling, internally grooved tube making, and glass-lens moulding, including their implementation in apparatus for ultra-high-pressure generators and assembling machine tools.