## 1 Introduction  
The wear and lifetime of cutting tools is an important technological and cost problem in various industries, including the broadly understood wood industry, in the production of furniture and construction joinery. Tool wear is a continuous process that begins with the first operation performed by the new tool, lasting throughout the tool's life, and ends when the tool is considered dull, i.e., not suitable for further work, after reaching the blunting criterion. The blunting criterion can be based on a direct tool wear indicator, measured using an optical microscope, and reaching its specific limit value is the moment when the tool ends (end of tool's life) and when it is replaced with a new tool [1]. The direct wear indicator is most often used in scientific research because it provides reliable information about the condition of the tool. Unfortunately, in industrial production conditions, the measurement of the direct wear indicator is difficult, and often even impossible; therefore, in such conditions, indirect indicators of tool wear related to the quality of machining are used. The criterion of blunting becomes, for example, insufficient edge quality or low dimensional accuracy, or the condition of the surface with too high roughness. It is the machining quality associated with the workpiece that determines the moment when the tool is dull and its replacement with a new tool. The problem with the blunting criterion adopted in this way is the non-obvious nature of the relationship between tool wear and the quality of machining. The obtained correlations between direct wear indicators and machining quality indicators are often at an average level, thus also showing the influence of factors other than tool wear [2]. Therefore, when determining the tool's life on the basis of qualitative indicators, this aspect should be taken into account. Most commonly, in the machining of widely understood wood materials, tools with WC-Co sintered tungsten carbide blades are used, which are an economically viable alternative to more expensive polycrystalline diamond tools, as well as to non-durable steel tools [3; 4]. The tool's life with polycrystalline diamond blades is higher than that of other tool materials; however, certain functional features made it so that tungsten carbide began to dominate in the machining of wood-based materials. It was tungsten carbide that showed lower wear from brittle fracture when sawing a three-layer particleboard at high speeds. This wood-based construction material is considered to be extremely difficult to machine due to the significant content of mineral substances (in the form of sand). Polycrystalline diamond, as an extremely hard tool material and therefore resistant to friction, is characterized by insufficient resistance to brittle fracture, especially under high speed conditions, which occurs during cutting with circular saws [5; 6; 7]. The indicated technological advantage in this one aspect of machining with the use of WC-Co tungsten carbide is an impulse for its widespread use in the machining of wood materials. However, there is still a significant difference in the tribological durability (resistance to friction) between WC-Co and a polycrystalline diamond. Therefore, attempts have been made to improve the abrasion resistance when cutting wood materials by modifying the surface layer of WC-Co tools in the ion implantation process, nitriding and the use of anti-abrasive coatings [1; 8; 9; 10; 11]. Ion implantation is a non-equilibrium method [12; 13; 14; 15] of material doping in which the ionized atoms are accelerated in the electric field to speeds from hundreds to thousands of kilometres per second, formed into a beam and implanted into the surface of the modified material. Moreover, modified materials are free from the delamination of a layer characteristic for the modification of the surface with anti-abrasive coatings [4].