Electro Arc
10 Ways you can use Electro Arc Metal Disintegrators

When you think of a metal disintegrator you probably think of removing broken bolts.  Electro Arc metal disintegrators have a variety of uses.  Disintegrating hard metal is easy with our machines!  A minute arc causes the disintegration process at predetermined intervals.  These arcs burn microscopic pieces of your work metal.

Here are just 10 ways you can use your Electro Arc metal disintegrator to save time and money by accomplishing in minutes what would have taken you hours or days to do in the past.

Broken Taps

You can use your Electro Arc metal disintegrator to remove broken taps from any material. A machine with an Arc*er head will remove taps between #6 – 1 1/4″.  If you need to remove between #0 and 2″ or bigger, the IQ head is built to disintegrate the largest and smallest taps.  If you will be disintegrating carbide, look into our DC metal disintegrators!

Broken Studs

You can remove broken studs  with an Electro Arc metal disintegrator.  Use one of our DC models to remove larger diameter studs (2.5″ – 6″) As illustrated below:

Broken Drills

Don’t waste hours removing broken drills.  Save money and salvage your parts.

Broken Reamers

When reamers break they can be especially hard to remove.  Use your metal disintegrator to remove broken reamers with no damage to your part.

Cut Round and Shaped Holes

Your metal disintegrator can be used to cut round holes without annealing the surrounding metal regardless of the rockwell hardness!

Cut shaped holes in hardened metals using shaped electrodes.

Preserve the thread when you remove large broken taps by disintegrating out the core.  Our magnetic pick set helps you remove the sections in no time!

You can remove small diameter drills from expensive parts saving you from salvaging expensive machine parts.

When you have a frozen stud our metal disintegrators can still save you time and money by removing the broken stud, screw or bolt with two cuts.

You may have wiped out half of the thread on your broken bolt trying to remove it, broken easy-out in the hole, made a mess trying to weld out a broken stud, or totally galled the thread when you were trying to remove that broken stud.  If you really want an easy solution for removing broken studs and screws, we have your solution!  An alternative to the “two cuts” method illustrated above?  The square hole.  When you disintegrate a square hole in your broken studs you can use an socket wrench to remove them!

Save your broken end mills!  As any machine shop knows, broken end mills can shut down operations costing your company more money per hour than you can afford!  Our Metal disintegrators will save your broken end mill and save you money immediately!

An Electro Arc metal disintegrator is an investment some companies use to provide metal disintegration services for time sensitive jobs!  Most of our customers need the metal disintegrator to continue operations this is especially true for power stations, petro-chemical works, oil equipment, offshore installation ships and general process industries.  In these industries every minute is worth thousands of dollars.  If you have key piece of equipment, that needs repair due to a broken fastener you need it now!  Easy out will not cut it in these settings!

Applications go well beyond just broken stud and bolt removal.  you can cut slots 1mm wide, and 10mm deep in heavy test pieces for calibration or deep cuts through seized clevis pins.  Orientation is never a problem with our versatile disintegrating heads!

Are you looking for more applications for your metal disintegrator?  Check out our new post 10 More Ways you Can use Electro Arc Metal Disintegrators.

Watch a Broken Drill Removed From Manifold

The following is a transcription of the above video. Please reach out to us here with any questions or concerns.

Hi and welcome to Electro ARC. Today we’re going to be demonstrating our DC direct current output disintegrating transformer which is optimally suited for removing broken carbide tooling. We have a broken 12 mm carbide drill selector. We’ve determined that we need to use a 312,000 electrode to remove the broken carbide drill.  The electrode is inserted into the disintegrator head. The machine is equipped with a disintegrator DC head and automatic servo feed, stop and start switches and depth stop. To begin the process i bring my electrode down on the broken tool, drop my splash bag, cover the edges with a rag, and using the start stop switches I begin the process. It tells us that we need 18 up through 9 by 32 in. Our machines can meet the needs of any part size shape or configuration. We’ve gone through and removed some of the loose bits of carbide drill left in the hole and there’s still a little bit of the drill down in the hole that’s not loose yet. So we’re going to take the disintegrator back down and we are still going to go with 1 in increments. As you can see, the head backed out and that’s indicating that we have  another loose piece of drill bit, so I can go in there and should be able to rummage around and find it, lets get our head out of the way and then with our compressed air we can clean out the hole and I can see bits of material down in there for us to pick out with some pics and pliers.  What we’ve done here is using our pics and and needle nose pliers is bring the chunks of the drill out of the hole and got to the solid drill and using a twisting action removed it from the hole leaving a clean hole undamaged for future use.

View more helpful videos for using your metal disintegrator on our new website for machine owners.

In the above video, Electro Arc’s 2-DVC DC metal disintegrating machine demonstrates the removal of broken carbide tooling. Equipped with our servo head with auto-feed allows for easy remote start and stop. Disintegrate up to 1 1/4 inch diameter in one pass. See more broken bolt removal examples.

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