Tool Wear and Abrasion

I hope someone may be able to provide some insight to a question I have concerning tooling. In industrial boat manufacturing, do certain tools wear out quickly due to the fact that composite materials are not easy to machine and are often highly abrasive? I am thinking of cutting tools (milling tools, drills, routers...) for machining fiberglass and composite materials and for machining molds, as well as the molds themselves. Another way to pose the question is: could industrial boatbuilders achieve significant cost savings if certain tooling was made to last longer or work faster / produce less scrap?

Thanks for any insight you may be able to provide.

Jeff

[glasbotomboat]

I grind a lot of laminated glass in my shop and needed a sixty grit flexible diamond disc and could not wait a day or so for my normal supplier, so I looked in the phonebook and saw "Spirakut Abrasives" with a local distributor. Their market is primarily boat builders/shops and much of their products is coarse diamond i.e. cutters, grinders etc.
Good for me and bad for narrow minded people, is the fact that diamond pays for itself soon by virtually never wearing out (using hook and loop backed flexible diamond), but many people don't want to layout the initial cash for diamonds. I guess they just like to constantly change disks and overheat their work with dull abrasive. (speaking from the glass grinding perspective not fiberglass grinding). My guess with fiberglass grinding, is that clogged disks and belts are a constant problem.
In short, Diamonds are also a guys best friend in the shop, as carbide dulls in fiberglass quick. - JB