The Nomad CNC Mill on kickstarter

[Neale]

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.

I thought that it still meant tungsten carbide. Not sure that it's quite correct to talk about steel as an iron carbide as it's more of a physical mix than a chemical compound. Silver steel is around 1% carbon, I think? Definitely inferior to, say, high-speed steels for cutting tools but it depends what you are doing. I've made things like a T-slot cutter for T-slots too small for standard commercial cutters from silver steel, and for one-off jobs they work fine even cutting mild steel. But, of course, American carbide is the best sort. Unless you come from Sheffield? Or do they just make steel? Now stands back while all the metallurgists and chemists out there sharpen their darts...

What the hell, the tools are probably the best bit of this "so quiet you can use it on your coffee table" router!