Tiger automatic wet blasting machine for carbide inserts

The technical challenge

By the time an insert reaches wet blasting it carries the accumulated cost of raw material, sintering, grinding, and geometry preparation. A cobalt surface that undermines coating adhesion, an edge hone radius outside tolerance, or staining from inadequate post-blast drying does not produce a marginal part. It produces scrap at the point of maximum embedded value, one process step before coating completes it. With carbide now a strategic material, the cost of that failure has permanently increased. The Tiger was engineered to eliminate it.

Process control and compliance

The Tiger’s CNC servo-driven blast gantry traverses the Y axis (700mm stroke, ±0.5mm accuracy) while pallets advance in the X axis, so every insert on every pallet receives the same blast geometry and dwell time. Nozzle height and angle are set independently on each gun crown to reach complex insert geometries. Closed-loop slurry pressure control compensates for nozzle and hose wear, up to 999 recipes are stored and recalled by batch, and every cycle is covered by post-process reporting. Optional RFID pallet tracking, barcode recipe loading, per-gun airflow monitoring and MES integration take traceability down to the individual pallet, supporting ISO 9001 and equivalent quality systems.

Why Vapormatt

Vapormatt built the first automated edge honing machines for cutting tool inserts in the 1980s and holds the patent for K-factor edge control by wet blasting (GB2590936B). We have built only wet blasting machines since 1978, supplied more than 2,000 of them to over 50 countries, and co-developed insert finishing technology with Sandvik.

• Patented elutriation tower (recommended for edge honing): Continuously removes broken-down abrasive finer than the selected particle size from the slurry, keeping media grading consistent so edge hone radius stays reproducible across long production runs.
• Integrated washing and hot-air drying: Inserts are rinsed, optionally ultrasonically washed, given a final DI water rinse and dried with air from above and below, which lifts them in their pockets so no surface stays wet. That prevents the staining, corrosion and cobalt leaching that occur when parts wait between blasting and a separate wash line.
• Two separately controlled gun crowns: Each 8-gun crown is fitted at 45°, 55°, 60° or 80°, or as a manually adjustable 45°/80° crown, with its own recipe, nozzle height and angle. Pallets can be processed with two different blast recipes in sequence, for example an edge hone followed by a polishing pass.
• Formal acceptance testing: Every Tiger undergoes Factory Acceptance Testing at our facility and Site Acceptance Testing after commissioning. The machine meets its agreed specification before you commit production to it.

Learn about the patented and proprietary technology underpins the Tiger's performance

The Vapormatt Promise: the machine meets the agreed specification, or we make it right.

The bottom line

Carbide costs have permanently shifted, so every pallet held in tolerance protects margin. The Tiger combines edge honing, pre-coating preparation and post-coating finishing with washing and drying in one validated in-line process, in a 7.7m line drawing 47kW. If you need two fully independent blast chambers, to run two processes at once or double the output of one, the dual-chamber Tiger+ is the larger alternative.

Read about wet blasting for cutting tool inserts