Quote Originally Posted by Neale View Post
But it comes with cutters ground from genuine American carbide! That must make it lots better, no?
That's another thing that puzzles me. When I was a nipper, carbide meant tungsten carbide, or wolfram carbide if you were foreign.

It now seems to mean iron carbide, which confuses me because surely iron carbide is what we called "steel".

Carbon steel cutters are considered seriously third rate, but how can you have steel without carbon? Isn't steel an alloy of iron and carbon? Perhaps carbon steel is an abbreviation for high carbon steel.

I suspect carbide may mean some clever steel alloy with a fancy fine grain structure that doesn't hold flaws easily? Called carbide because it is reminiscent of the good old tungsten product. A bit like calling graphite, Graphene to make it sound all modern and trendy.