Why are cermet saw blades so expensive?
As the volume grows the price will drop like a rock. With increasing demand, the amount of cermet material treated will increase and the cost of treating cermet tips will approach that for treating carbide materials. It will be a while but eventually we will be treating tips for pennies instead of dollars and some tips we will treat for fractions of a cent. Now we have to buy minimum quantities, which are usually 3,000 to 5,000 parts in order to sell a hundred or so. We are treating the parts on a laboratory basis. It takes an engineer about an hour to set up to treat the parts and about 45 minutes to run a pound or so, which equates to at least an hour to run between 100 and 500 parts. This is high cost labour and laboratory time which currently needs to be re-couped in the price of the parts. Finally, we use small quantities of uncommon, high purity chemicals. Again cost is very high because there is a very small demand. Apparently we are the only people using some of these chemicals
