A professional who fabricates tungsten-carbide cutting tips for use on lathes, planers, milling machines, and other metalworking tools, using mechanical or hydraulic press, furnaces, cutting and grinding wheels, and precision-measuring instruments. Respnsibilities include:

• Weighs cobalt, carbon, tungsten, titanium, and other powdered metals on balance scale to obtain specified molding mixture.
• Pours mixture from pans into molds or into hoppers for automatic feeding into molds in press.
• Turns valves on press to compress mixture into billet.
• Removes billet from press.
• Sets automatic feed, time, and temperature controls on sintering furnace.
• Feeds billets into furnace to fuse metals together.
• Removes billets from furnace and cuts and grinds them into cutting tips, using diamond cutting wheel and electric grinding wheel.
• Measures cutting edges of tips to ensure attainment of specified tolerances, using gauges, rulers, micrometers, and protractors.
• Sets pyrometer controls of heat-treating furnace, and feeds cutting tips into furnace to harden them.
• May regrind cutting tips and remeasure for conformance to specifications.