Yes its definitely getting better, the literature safeman’s posted is going to take a while to chew over, and I’m sure it’ll add a lot of further scope for thought, but as I’m a hands-on and direct experience sort of bloke, I’ll stick my neck on the block and add this for now: when it’s down to steels, alloys, hardening, tempering, manufacturers claims etc, you can pretty much make what you want of it.
Before I ventured into my own tungsten carbide and cubic boron nitride bits I’d dabbled with good old fashioned silver steel- lots of it!
For me its still the most mis-represented and underestimated basic ‘tool’ steel there is. All you hear is, ’it’ll be so hard it shatters’ or, ’it won’t be hard enough to cut through that’.
well, having made many different types of cutters for hand-tool and machine tool use, and all without any problems with regards to hardness or brittleness, the rumours did eventually get me doubtful on the brittleness of tapered safe plugs I’d been making in batches for years. This led to a simple but extreme experiment which involved a 25 kilo block of steel on the concrete workshop floor, a very large sledgehammer, and a hardened safe plug I’d made to maximum hardness without tempering. The outcome was a lot of shouting, expletives, people diving in different directions, and a broken double glazed window. The Plug itself showed a few ‘flats’ from impacts but apart from that, had retained the fine tool marks from initial turning, it’s polished finish, and it remained intact.
Before that simple experiment I’d spent a lot of time, which with hindsight was pretty much wasted, experimenting with different levels of tempering with the sole belief that it needed it and it had to have it. That was just plain old Stubb’s carbon silver steel. I haven’t a clue if it’s available in the USA, or what silver steel is called your side of the pond if you can get it, but it’s not an exotic steel by any means. In fact I seem to remember explaining the whole silver steel thing before to Doug in one of my model vault posts.
Anyway i have to admit these in-depth posts are proving time consuming on this new iPad, and I have to mention the kindness and help of our member mercury, who’s enabled me to enlargen any posted info and pictures without them jumping across the screen to oblivion. Thanks Mercury, I can at last have a proper closeup look at the recent pictures and scans! 🙁y):🙁whew):
