Work

Work. This is to me the single best facet of my learning this year, and it's only possible because of my non-traditional schooling. And I sure do learn a lot. Today, for instance:

1. Working with a small company is really cool and really educational. A lot of what we're doing right now is talking to other, much larger companies, and trying to market our products. This is a long process, because even if someone is interested in what we have, there's a lot of waiting and exchanging emails involved before anything happens. They need to find out what we can do, how much it will cost, or if they really want or can use it. On our end, we have to figure out what information to reveal, what prices to put on things, how to get them interested, what they actually want, and so on. We need to try and figure out how they'll react to certain ideas and how we can get them interested and paying. And even when they are willing to do something with us, it always starts with just a test, which hopefully we pay for. We haven't gotten to that stage with anyone yet, but it seems possible.

2. I read some about various ways to cut diamond today. Jewelers use diamond saws. We don't. For anything, we usually user a laser saw. How can a laser cut diamond? Well, what it does is that in the place it hits the diamond, it converts that area into graphite, which is then evaporated off by a second pass of the laser. It's a sawing motion, where the first pass does the graphitization, and the second pass removes the graphite. This and graphite mills are the standard. My boss, however, wanted me to look into abrasive water jetting as a method of cutting diamond. If you're not familiar with it, what abrasive water jetting does is that it accelerates water up to extremely high speeds and pressures, and then mixes it with an abrasive media. For hard materials like diamond, this would be Aluminum Oxide, Silicon Carbide, or diamond. Then, this mixture is propelled out through a nozzle and onto the thing being cut. While this method is not generally used to cut diamond, I found a recent study (early 2009) investigating it's usefulness for this. Apparently, it works. Not surprisingly, speed depends on the abrasive media, with Alumina being the slowest and diamond the fastest. What surprised me, however, was that the paper claimed that rates were comparable to those obtained by Electrical Discharge Machining, which means that it could become a viable method in the future. Who knows, maybe our company will pioneer its use?

And that's about it. Different methods of machining diamond are really interesting, and I could go on more. If you want to read about them, I suggest looking up Electrical Discharge Machining on wikipedia. You can read the abstract for the paper I found Here.