Thread: washita confusion

Originally Posted by DaveW

Were they vanadium carbides? Turning tools are full of vanadium carbides. I don't like them too much, but they do wear slowly if you can manage to keep them in the matrix.

Even chromium carbides aren't going to be touched. The best I can figure, the dots on the LN iron are about 25 microns. I have no clue what the typical carbide size would be in cryo treated A2, but I thought the carbides sort of spread out and bonded together a little more. Maybe they're being pulled out in bunches.

Not sure. The grade of HSS was T15 so they may have been tungsten carbides. Although there are probably more than one type present in a lot of steels since they're almost always alloyed with a lot of small percentages of different stuff.

Originally Posted by eKretz

Not sure. The grade of HSS was T15 so they may have been tungsten carbides. Although there are probably more than one type present in a lot of steels since they're almost always alloyed with a lot of small percentages of different stuff.

I looked it up. Heavily alloyed with tungsten, chromium and vanadium. Definitely beyond the scope of washitas! The early tungsten high speed steels were actually quite nice, but they're not common now.