How to Remove Burrs

1.How burr comes?

With types or thicknesses, before various materials serve us in daily life, they come from massive ones. We cut them into the sizes and shapes we need. Whatever cutting methods adopted, burrs occur at the edges.

▪ metal burrs or dross. When doing the laser cutting, flame cutting or plasma cutting, the metal melt at the edge under high temperature. When having the water-jet cutting, erosion of abrasive particles effect on metal cutting surface. When punching metal, the physical fracture occurs at the edge.

▪ Wood burrs. When saw cuts the wood fibers.

▪ Stone burrs. When mechanical cutting works on mineral particles.

All these lead to burrs or dross(for metal) on materials.

Though we are continuously after to develop methods to avert burrs when we process materials, like to choose the most suitable cutting tools, improve cutting techniques, it’s impossible to eliminate burrs or dross completely when processing.

2.Deburring Meaning

1. Safety. The rough edges with burrs are extremely sharp. They cut your hands when you carry or assemble them. As safety is paramount, deburring is the basis for any next processing.
2. Ensure the adhesion of subsequent coating

No matter the coating or lacquer, the uneven edge with burrs cannot be covered evenly. Once the thinner parts of the coating start to peel off, consequently, the exposure to humidity and air will lead to rust.

3. Ensure the assembly precision and sealing

Apparently, two edges with burrs cannot be perfectly matched with each other, which will result in the precision loss of the whole component. When in the hydraulic or pneumatic systems, the situation is even worse, the burrs would cut sealing parts and lead to serious leakage.

4. Avert the damage to equipment.

The falling fiber burrs or metal dross will stick into the equipment, causing damages or contamination to equipment. Eventually, it will make a tremendous loss or even accidents.

5. Appearance

The metal with burrs gives a coarse appearance, which sharply degrades the visual quality of your products.

Obviously, deburring process must be carried out before the metal goes into the next process.

3.How to remove burrs

Since burrs have such a wide range of hazards and damage, deburring is integral in material processing. So, let’s move to how to remove the burrs.

Honestly, there are so many manual deburring tools today, like scraper, electric hand grinder, pneumatic die grinder. Comparing to its portability, their defects of time-consuming, low-efficiency, inconsistent results make them fail to meet today’s heavy-duty industrial requirements.

We, Armpre, have already developed mature automatic deburring machines. Come to look how we handle your deburring challenges. With more than 20-year manufacturing experience and customer feedback, we deliberately select the most effective and efficient deburring tooling for our machines as follows.

1. Rotary Abrasive Brushes. They are doing clockwise rotation and orbital revolution, mainly providing outer profile and horizontal deburring on workpieces. They are composed of thousands of narrow, curved nylon strips, evenly embedded with abrasive particles, such as aluminum oxide (mostly for wood) or silicon carbide(for metal or stone).

When the strips impact the burrs at an extremely high speed, they make the burrs peel off or fracture. Just like you slash the icicle hanging from the eaves with towel, but at a very fast speed. On the other hand, the curving nylon strips flex to conform to the metal edge to a certain depth, so that the abrasive particles sand the edge when contact is made.

2. Disc Brushes. They are doing rotation and revolution as well. When there are holes (no matter small or big) on your workpiece, Rotary Abrasive Brushes, in the main, deal with the outer profile and horizontal surface deburring, while the vertical surface of the holes cannot be handled, we bring in disc brushes. These brushes in the vertical direction can reach the deep pocket vertical surface to do the deburring. However, the material of disc brushes is distinct from rotary brushes. They look like bristles. They are made of nylon (sometimes also with abrasive particles such as alunimum particles, or steel wire).

3. Hammer disc. When the burrs or dross are serious, or even for heavy slags, we bring in hammer head. There are dozens of hardened steel pins on the head. With the rotation of discs, the high-moving steel pins impact the burrs, dross or slags. The higher the speed, the stronger the impact force.

Rotary abrasive brushes and disc brushes can be used for wood, metal and stone, but with different brush materials (aluminum oxide, silicon carbide or ceramic) and different grits, while hammer disc is for metals only.

We will select one of above deburring tools or a combination of them based on your workpiece material, processing strength and expected finish. The quantity of each deburring tool depends on the width and processing strength of your workpieces.

Incidentally, when we talk about deburring, we would not skip edge rounding, as 90°edge is still dangerous for stone or metal (if you really need sharp 90 degree edge, you may need edge milling machine or end facing machine). If you want to have relatively flat edge, you can consider 0.5mm (R0.5), or if you prefer to have big roundover, you can choose 2mm (R2) or even 3mm (R3). Talk to your supplier about the radius when purchasing.

The ultimate goal is using our tried-and-tested experience to work out the best solution for you, to meet your expectation within a single pass.

See you soon.