Tungsten carbide tools are graded based on their hardness and composition.

The grading system ranges from soft to hard and brittle to tough. Some machining applications call for a carbide tool that is made of very hard, but brittle material that can hold an edge.

Other applications call for material that can resist shock and is softer and tougher. By varying the proportion of the cobalt used as binder, and by using different metallic carbides, the properties of the cemented carbide can be managed.


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1. Machining. Machinists frequently use tungsten carbide tools to machine other hard metals, such as stainless steel. When they are manufacturing machine parts, the material that they are constructed from must be hard and resistant to wear. This makes milling or machining these metals that much more difficult, and, as such, must choose a material harder than the material to be machined. Tungsten carbide fits this bill perfectly.

2. High Production. When producing a large number of units in an industrial setting, the mechanisms that are stamping or machining the parts should be long-lasting and resistant to wear. For this reason, even when the machined material is not particularly difficult to work with, use tungsten carbide due to its longevity. It is subject to chipping, however, and is frequently coated with another material.

3. High-Speed Tools. In industrial applications where tools will be used at a high rate of speed, high temperatures inherently follow. Tungsten carbide is resistant to extremely high temperatures, making it ideal for situations where tools and mechanisms are needed to perform in these high-heat applications. This makes them useful for grinding tools and metal milling bits.

4. Torch and Welding Tips. Tungsten carbide is used for acetylene and other torching applications where you need a material that can retain its properties under constant exposure to flame. It is also useful in welding applications where a metal is exposed to high heat but cannot bond to the material being welded.


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1. Hold a magnet to the item you are examining. If the magnet is attracted to it, the item is not tungsten carbide, it is iron or steel. However, sometimes tungsten carbide is used as a tip for an item, particularly saw blades, so this test is sometimes misleading.

2. Pick up the item and "heft" it. Tungsten carbide is very dense, and a tungsten carbide object will feel very heavy relative to its size. If you have a piece of steel that is a similar size to the object you are inspecting, the item will weigh about twice as much as the steel if it is carbide. This is the most conclusive test that does not risk damaging the item you are examining.

3. Scratch the item with a steel nail. The Mohs hardness scale is a method of measuring the hardness of different materials. Steel has a Mohs hardness that ranges between 5 and 8.5. Tungsten Carbide will range between 8 and 9, depending upon the exact alloy that the carbide is made from. Typically, tungsten carbide will scratch steel and will not be scratched by steel. Tungsten carbide will scratch glass as well, as another way to test its hardness.

4. Examine the item. Tungsten carbide does not corrode under normal conditions and does not rust. Seeing either of these indicates that the item is made from some other metal.

5. Put the item to a grinder and watch the sparks. Sparks from tungsten carbide are short and dark red, and are very distinctive to carbide. This is a fairly definitive test, but is somewhat more dangerous than other methods of identification and can damage the item.


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Manual metal arc welding was first invented in Russia in 1888. It involved a bare metal rod with no flux coating to give a protective gas shield. The development of coated electrodes did not occur until the early 1900s when the Kjellberg process was invented in Sweden and the Quasi-arc method was introduced in the UK. It is worth noting that coated electrodes were slow to be adopted because of their high cost. However, it was inevitable that as the demand for sound welds grew, manual metal arc became synonymous with coated electrodes. When an arc is struck between the metal rod (electrode) and the workpiece, both the rod and workpiece surface melt to form a weld pool. Simultaneous melting of the flux coating on the rod will form gas and slag which protects the weld pool from the surrounding atmosphere. The slag will solidify and cool and must be chipped off the weld bead once the weld run is complete (or before the next weld pass is deposited).

The process allows only short lengths of weld to be produced before a new electrode needs to be inserted in the holder. Weld penetration is low and the quality of the weld deposit is highly dependent on the skill of the welder.

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