2. Expressing industrial needs

2.1 The birth of need

It seems that man has always tried to make things faster, more difficult, more precise, more economical, smaller, bigger, ... better, and he will surely continue to do so!

Turning techniques for hard, or even very hard, steels are part of this dynamic of progress.

Hard turning has undoubtedly existed since the advent of extra-hard cutting tools. What limited its industrial expansion was a lack of understanding of the phenomena involved in its application, the prohibitive cost of c-BN cutting materials - up to more than €120 per edge in 1994 - and the absence of machine tools specially designed for this application. Figure 4...