Domestic tools need to go hand in hand with the machine tool industry

Not long ago, when I participated in a customer event, I was fortunate enough to get acquainted with a senior engineer who had worked hard for decades in the machinery industry. When talking to the Chinese tool industry, the engineer expressed a lot of emotion: “As of now, China's cutting tool industry has indeed achieved A lot of achievements, many products have reached or even reached the international advanced level, so that China's cutting tool products have entered the international advanced ranks, basically meet the needs of modern manufacturing development, this view is wrong.

In recent years, the development of China's machine tool industry has been extremely rapid and has achieved fruitful results. It has for many years steadily took the position of the world's largest machine tool consumer, producer and importer. However, the associated tool industry is far from satisfactory, forming a domestic CNC. The embarrassing situation where the machine tool does not match with the domestic tool has to be equipped with an "Earth knife". The extensive development of the Chinese tool industry for many years has finally exposed its defects in the face of economic restructuring and product upgrading, which has seriously restricted the healthy and orderly development of the machine tool industry.

With the advancement of science and technology and the application of new materials and the appearance of high-precision machinery and equipment, higher requirements have been placed on the performance of the tool. Traditional high-speed steel tools slowly retired from the second line and were replaced by carbide tools. Carbide has a series of excellent properties such as high hardness, wear resistance, strength and toughness, heat resistance, corrosion resistance, etc., especially its high hardness and wear resistance, and it remains basically unchanged even at a temperature of 500°C. , It still has high hardness at 1000°C. Cemented carbide is widely used as a tool material, such as turning tools, milling cutters, planers, drills, boring tools, etc., for cutting cast iron, non-ferrous metals, plastics, chemical fiber, graphite, glass, stone, and ordinary steel, but also for cutting. Heat-resistant steel, stainless steel, high manganese steel, tool steel and other difficult-to-machine materials. The cutting speed of the new carbide tool is equivalent to hundreds of times that of ordinary high-speed steel tools. From the viewpoint of machining efficiency and product accuracy, the carbide tool is more suitable for future machining needs.

High-grade cutting tools rely on imports, and there is a serious excess of middle- and low-end tooling capacity. This is the current embarrassing situation facing the Chinese cutting tool industry. According to statistics, China's current annual tool sales is about 14.5 billion yuan, of which cemented carbide tools account for less than 25%. In developed countries, the proportion of cemented carbide tools reaches 70%, which occupies an absolutely dominant position, and high-speed steel cutting tools are being reduced by 1%-2% annually, and the current proportion has fallen below 30%. China produces about 80,000 tons of high-speed steel annually, which accounts for about 40% of the world's total production, and consumes a large amount of valuable rare resources such as tungsten and molybdenum. This kind of blind expansion and low-level repetition has resulted in a large surplus of high-speed steel cutters, which has to be sold at low prices, resulting in excessive production capacity of a large number of tool manufacturing companies, serious product homogenization, and low corporate profits. Domestic tools are not only far away from the structure of foreign tool products, but also can not meet the growing demand for cemented carbide tools in the domestic manufacturing industry. The problem of disconnection between supply and demand structure has been very serious. The consequence is that a large number of high-speed steel cutters are exported at low prices. Or domestic sales, while high-performance hard alloy cutting tools have to rely on a large number of imports, the domestic production of tools and market demand is not commensurate, the structure is seriously out of balance.

In today's global integration of market economy, it is particularly important to strive to narrow the gap with the international advanced level and identify the development trend of the tool industry and catch up. Regardless of the survival space of China's cutting tool industry, or from the perspective of improving the overall competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry, it is imperative to accelerate structural adjustment and promote the development of high-efficiency carbide cutting tools.