Yeah, some are solid, but some have steel shanks. Found it to be extremely forgiving and strong for making small clock parts on my watchmaker's lathe - would like to find larger diameter pieces.
Seems to anneal nicely, too, but haven't tried to harden it.
Can anyone shed some light on this stuff? thanks / mark
Carbide is used for PCB drilling, steel goes blunt very quickly.
Leon
It can still have steel shanks, bonded to the carbide business end (saving a bit of materials cost).
If he can anneal it, it certainly is *not* solid carbide all the way through. :-)
However, I have no idea what steel they happen to use for the shanks, and I suspect that it may well be manufacturer dependent. If you can find who made the ones which you are using, perhaps the best bet is to ask *them* -- explaining that you are not planning to go into competition with them, but that you simply want to duplicate the steel in larger sizes.
Good Luck, DoN.
Not to mention that he is machining it, and unless he is using diamond tooling that seems unlikely. If they are solid and not carbide then they probably are HSS. If the shanks have a carbide cutter brazed to them, the shanks are probably plain old low carbon steel. Any thing better would be a waste as the modulus of elasticity is approximately the same for all steels regardless of the hardness, strength, or alloying elements.
We use the small stuff in our prototype lab - cad to a one of router type -
The mills 8 or 10 or 15 mil and routers and like tools are solid carbide. The drills are solid as well.
The professional types with the wheels (color) on the outside that act as a drill stop in the big machines - are carbide from what I have seen.
These are the small ones, I suspect the larger ones could be anything.
Martin
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