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Carbide inserts – coatings and colours

By Niraj M Wanikar, Chief Editor, CNCTimes.com, 2015-01-16 12:01:57

By GV Dasarathi

CNC

Carbide inserts – all those beautiful colours !

Here’s the secret behind the colours of inserts. Plain tungsten carbide is grey, and various other colours are the result of the coating material. If the insert has multiple coatings, the colour is that of the topmost coating. Here are the colours corresponding to various materials.


Tungsten carbide insert colours

If you’re just saying, “Hey, this stuff looks so beautiful, maybe I should start making jewellery out of it and become rich”, I have bad news for you. Someone already beat you to it. Tungsten carbide jewellery is quite popular already, for more or less the same reasons that we use it in metal cutting. Because of its hardness, a ring or bracelet made from Tungsten Carbide will not lose its lustre (unlike silver or gold), will never need polishing, and is scratch-proof. Also it is hypo-allergenic, which means you can’t be allergic to it, like some people are allergic to Silver or Gold jewellery (they’re actually allergic to the traces of Nickel in these).


Tungsten carbide jewellery

If you’re planning to get married many times in your life (like Glynn Wolfe, with his 29 marriages), a carbide ring would be a good idea to save money by not buying a new ring for each new marriage. Each time a marriage breaks up and the spouse chucks his/her ring back at you, you just pick it up, dust it off, and give it to the next one – no scratches, shining like brand new.

Etc.

Wedding lunch in Chennai

A dietitian’s nightmare !
The meal has at least 15 accessories (count the number on the leaves in the pictures) that are served first. This is followed by rice, sambar, more rice, rasam, ‘payasam’ (kheer), even more rice, and curds. Typically served on a banana leaf, the nice aesthetics of the banana leaf nowadays being neutralized by plastic water bottles, plastic glasses, and a plastic ‘table cloth’.

After all this you stagger out with difficulty to the table with the betel nut and leaf. As you’re chewing on this you ruminate on the terrible trouble you’re going to have with your digestive system the next day. If you’re on a weight loss program, you’re also dreading the 20 km. that you’ll have to walk to shed this lunch (assuming 1000 calories, 50 calories per km.)

Having said all that, however, there’s nothing like a good wedding lunch to improve your mood. So anyone out there having a wedding with too few guests and too much food ordered by mistake ? Call me for help !

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