Stainless steel
Stylus stems manufactured from stainless steel are used widely for styli with ball/tip diameters of 2 mm or greater and with lengths up to 30 mm. Within this range, one-piece steel stems offer the optimum stiffness to weight ratio, giving adequate ball/stem clearance without compromising stifness with a joint between the stem and threaded Body.
Tungsten carbide
Tungsten carbide stems are best used for maximising stiffness with either small stem diameters required for ball diameters of 1 mm and below, or lengths up to 50 mm.
Beyond this, weight can become a problem and stiffness is lost due to deflection at the stem to body joint.
Ceramic
For ball diameters greater than 3 mm, and lengths over 30mm, ceramic stems offer stifness comparable to steel butare significantly lighter than tungsten carbide. Ceramic stemmed styli can also offer additional crash protection to your probe as the stem will shater in a collision.
Carbon fibre
There are many grades of carbon fibre materials.
However, CNCI's material combines optimum stiffness characteristics, both longitudinally and in torsion, with extremely low weight. Carbon fibre is inert and this, combined with a special resin matrix, provides excellent protection in the most hostile of machine tool environments.
CNCI's material is ideal for maximising stifness for styiabove 50 mm in length. It is the optimum stem material for high accuracy strain gauge technology probes with excellent vibration damping characteristics and negligible co-efficient of thermal expansion.
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