Does heat treating tool steel make it stiffer?

No, at least not enough to worry about. Modulus of elasticity is the property you're interested in. It's pretty constant at 29-30 x 10^6 psi for all steels and stainless steels. Switching to another material can help, but unfortunately the alternatives are exotic and/or difficult to work with; tungsten carbide, tungsten, moly, e.g.

Ned Simmons

I'm struggling to restrain myself from making a risque rejoinder to this subject line.....

Mickey

Thanks Ned,

Is this something that is located in the Machinery handbook? I looked before the post but got impatient :-)

Mickey....I almost hesitated to use that term myself ;-)

There are a couple tables in MH (pp.334 & 335 in my 22nd ed.) that cover common metals, but I don't know of a single reference that includes the more exotic metals. Wikipedia has some data, and Matweb has info on specific materials.

Heat treating increases the breaking stress and wear resistance, but does not increase stiffness. You may still want to heat treat your bar so that it doesn't permanently bend under anything but the lightest cutting load.

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