Well, first off, I was totally serious about a 1200 grit diamond wheel for a carbide turning tool. The thing with the modern 'micro' or 'nano' grained carbide inserts is that you can get them a lot sharper than the older standard carbides like you used to find on the circular saw blades. For a carbide gouge to be successful, it would have to be the micro grained carbide. For those that use the carbide scrapers, it seems that the consensus is that you can sharpen them up okay, but they never get back to that factory edge. Don't know, and haven't tried. I know John Lucas did some micro photographs of his attempts to resharpen some carbide cutters, both cupped and flat ones. The cupped ones seemed to chip if I remember correctly, maybe he could post those pictures again..... I have no clue as to how fine of a grit would be needed to get them back to factory quality, but probably finer than what is generally available to most of us. I would guess we would need some thing like 3000 to 10,000 grit diamond plate. No clue as to what the industry uses. Maybe there could be a use for a wheel for the Tormek with a 1200 grit diamond on the wheel part and one side, and a 6000 grit on the other flat side..... Can't be used on the slow speed grinders though....
Now, this has me wondering how stellite and tangung would work. Stellite is the cutting material on the Woodcut coring system, and tantung is what is used on the Big Ugly tool. Both have very long lasting cutting edges, and can be sharpened on standard grinding wheels. I would expect a tantung piece, that was fluted, would cost in the range of $100 or so. When I bought 1 by 3 by 1/8 inch pieces of the tantung, I got best price if I bought 100 pieces. Buying one piece of tantung that was cut in a fluted shape would be very expensive.... It would also need to be supported by metal , totally on the outside parts of the shape because it is so brittle. Probably just not cost effective. Maybe some day, I will make a skew chisel out of the tantung, and sandwich it between 2 pieces of softer sheet stock. Just out of curiosity...
For sure, the carbide flat cutters are scrapers, though you can take some of them and put them up on edge for a better shear/slicing cut. I would think that the Hunter carbide cups could, and should only be used for bevel rub supported cuts. If they were held flat, I would thing they would be very catch prone if you tried to use them as a scraper. Think the old ring tools. The ones that were used flat like scrapers had chip limiters so you couldn't take off too much in one pass, which is most likely a safety thing. Not sure if the Hunter tools can be used for both push and pull cuts inside hollow forms, but can see where that might come in handy...
robo hippy