Visited Deloro Stellite

[george tichbour]

Last Friday I stopped at Deloro Stellite on the first day of a short holliday to pick up some 6K and meet Kelly and Ian.

The place is in Belleville Ontario Canada so it is not too far from home but I had never had the time to visit. It is an amazing place, much more diversified than I thought. Along with a foundry for sandcasting and lost wax casting they have an excellent powder metallurgy department and a huge machine shop to finish castings and refurbish worn machinery parts. The knifemaking material is produced from cast billets that is heated and rolled to thickness, quite a time consuming process because the material simply will not roll unless it is up to high heat. It has to be reheated between every rolling operation. Now I understand why the cost of the material is so high.

Apparently the rolling is an essential part of the operation as it improves the grain structure of the material the more it is rolled.

I spent about two hours looking around the operation with Ian and Kelly learning a lot about this material.

Did you know that all of Kellogg's cornflakes are cut with a stellite blade?

[whv]

enlighting, george
thanx for the info.
those corn flakes must be pretty tough to cut

I am absolutely fascinated by Stellite 6k. I could never figure out, to my own satisfaction, why it is so expensive. It still seems high, even for all the rolling they have to do.

Where you able to glean any more insight about that, Mr. T.?

[george tichbour]

Another cost factor is the raw material costs, when they make steel at least 30% is recycled scrap metal....scrap stellite isn't usually available for remelt so it is all new material all of the time.

I would also imagine that the commodity price for cobalt and chromium is quite high but I haven't checked it on the London Metals Exchange lately.

[PeterAtwood]

Cobalt is certainly expensive and in the quantities that they probably use it is VERY expensive. Chromium isn't cheap either.