Recycling Tungsten Carbide Drill Bits and Scrap

Get Paid for Scrap Tungsten Carbide Drill Bits and Tooling

We Recycle Tungsten Carbide Drill Bits and End Mills

Have you been discarding old tungsten carbide tooling when it gets worn or broken? If so, you’re missing out on a potentially significant source of revenue.

Tungsten carbide scrap has several useful properties. One of the most important is its extreme hardness, close to that of diamond, but it’s cheaper and more heat-resistant. Other useful properties of tungsten carbide include excellent corrosion resistance, high thermal and electrical conductivity, a high modulus of elasticity, and good resistance to thermal creep. These properties make tungsten carbide extremely useful in a wide range of applications, such as tungsten carbide drill bits, end mills, inserts, and other machining tools.

For more than two decades, Industrial Metal Service has been providing scrap metal pickup services to manufacturers, fabricators, and machine shops in the San Francisco Bay area. You’ll find no better partner to handle your tungsten carbide recycling requirements and compensate you fairly.

What Is Tungsten Carbide?

Tungsten carbide is an alloy of tungsten, an extremely hard and dense metal with a high melting point, and carbon. However, when referring to tungsten carbide drill bits and tooling, the term usually refers to cemented carbide—a composite material of tungsten carbide particles in a binder material, usually cobalt.

Tungsten carbide is even harder than metallic tungsten—about a 9 on the Mohs hardness scale, just behind diamond, the hardest substance on Earth. Because it’s so hard and strong, it’s invaluable to the manufacturing industry as a material for tungsten carbide drill bits, end mills, and other cutting tools.

How Is Tungsten Carbide Used?

Tungsten carbide’s properties make it incredibly useful for a variety of applications and industries. Tungsten carbide can be found in:

Inserts
Reamers
Drills
Boring bars
Round tooling
End mills
Saw tips
Taps
Punches and dies
Ballpoint pens
Automotive lining
Asphalt milling teeth
Golf clubs
Ammunition
Jewelry

The Value of Tungsten Carbide

You may be surprised to learn that tungsten carbide tooling is one of the most valuable metals in most machine shops.

The United States does not produce enough new tungsten carbide for domestic manufacturing needs, so it has to be imported. As demand grows, recycling has become a major source of tungsten carbide in the United States, helping to reduce our dependence on imports.

Many machine shops assume that recycling small pieces of tungsten carbide isn’t worth the cost of shipping. This might be true for some cheaper metals, but even small amounts of tungsten carbide have considerable value. The tungsten carbide waste metal recycling process is easy and cost-efficient, and tungsten carbide is always in demand, so metal recyclers buy scrap tungsten carbide drill bits, inserts, and tooling at great rates. It’s also very dense—twice as heavy as steel—so it doesn’t take much for the pounds to start adding up. Recycling tungsten carbide tooling can easily provide a good return relative to shipping costs, even in small, parcel-sized quantities.

Recycling Tungsten Carbide Drill Bits and More

Industrial Metal Service has been providing commercial waste metal recycling services to Bay Area manufacturers, fabricators, and machine shops for over two decades. We recycle ferrous and non-ferrous metals, including aluminum, brass, bronze, copper, stainless steel, carbon steel, titanium, high-temperature alloys, precious metals, and tungsten carbide.

We’ve earned our reputation as a reliable and trustworthy metal supplier and recycler in the Bay Area. We’d welcome the opportunity to learn more about your business, discuss your specific recycling requirements, and make it easy for you to do business with us. Give us a call and we’ll get it done—quickly.

Address
260 Phelan Avenue
San Jose, CA 95112

Phone Number
(408) 294-2334