Industrial ceramics can be extremely hard but still brittle because hardness and fracture toughness measure different behavior. Hardness resists scratching and indentation; fracture toughness describes resistance to crack propagation.

Flexural strength measures ceramic behavior under bending, where one surface enters tension. It can be more important than compressive strength for plates, honeycomb blocks and supported ceramic components that may span gaps or experience uneven loading.

Extrusion direction, pressing density, wall geometry and material consistency can make ceramic shrink differently in different directions. Custom tooling must compensate for real process shrinkage rather than simply scaling the final drawing by one percentage.

Green machining creates features before final firing and therefore requires shrinkage compensation. Fired machining works on the final hard ceramic and can achieve tighter critical dimensions, but usually needs diamond tooling and higher cost.

Extrusion suits continuous profiles and many tower-packing or honeycomb shapes; pressing offers repeatability for molded components; casting supports other complex forms. Ceramic product design should match the forming route rather than treating ceramic like machined metal.