What is the difference between carbide and tungsten steel?
Tungsten Steel: Tungsten steel goods have the characteristic of not being easily worn out. It is commonly used in lathe tools, impact drill bits, glass cutter bits and tile cutters, and is strong and not afraid of annealing, but is brittle.
Cemented carbide: also known as metal ceramics, is a metal carbide (WC, TaC, TiC, NbC, etc.) or metal oxides (such as Al2O3, ZrO2, etc.) as the main ingredient, to participate in the appropriate amount of metal powder (Co, Cr, Mo, Ni, Fe, etc.) made by powder metallurgy methods, with certain characteristics of metal ceramics. They are widely used for wear-resistant, high-temperature, corrosion-resistant, and harsh working environment parts or tool heads of knives and tools.
Tungsten steel is classified as carbide, but carbide is not necessarily tungsten steel. Nowadays, customers in Taiwan and Southeast Asian countries like to use the word tungsten steel, but if you talk to them carefully, you will find that most of them still refer to carbide.
The difference between tungsten steel and cemented carbide is that: aka high speed steel or tool steel, tungsten steel is made by steel making technology in steel water with ferro tungsten as the tungsten material, aka high speed steel or tool steel, its tungsten content is usually 15-25%; while cemented carbide is made by powder metallurgy technology with tungsten carbide as the main body and cobalt or other bonded metals together with sintering, its tungsten content is usually above 80%. Briefly, all hardness beyond HRC65 as long as the alloy can be called carbide, tungsten steel is only one kind of carbide hardness between HRC85 and 92, often used to do the knife.
