Goods manufactured using single point diamond turning (SPDT) are commonplace in everyday life in products from cell phones to street signs. Diamond turning is the process of using single crystal diamond (SCD) tools mounted on extremely precise machine tools to manufacture optical surfaces. The use of diamond tools to manufacture diffraction gratings dates back more than a century, but modern diamond turning was first used in the 1940s to manufacture infrared optics. In the 1960s manufacturing expanded into components such as laser optics, parabolic reflectors, and electron microscope parts.Since then, both private and publicly funded research and development has continued to expand to the materials available, and manufacturing techniques used to diamond turn parts. As the search for new materials and processes continues tool wear is a constant concern. Despite the broad array of available measurement techniques and substantial body of literature on the subject, there are still gaps in both the theory of diamond tool wear and experimental validation of that theory. The research presented here consists of three experiments: investigation of the relationship between wear and oxygen partial pressure, measurement of chemical activation energy, and investigation of tool wear as a function of crystallographic orientation. An uncertainty analysis of the measurement method used is also presented. The goal of this work is to improve the model of chemical wear in SPDT of metal alloys.