Yes yoose' were right the 1st time Mikey (agree to disagree!) Smiley Face here!...4 Monarch EE's, 3 Hardinge HLVS, 1 Rivett...+ various "garage" lathes (Southbend, Logan, Lablond, Clausing, + a Logan and a Craftsman (Atlas) actually at home garage lathes...35 yrs of machining jobs and making tooling for everything from Amana microwave parts to IBM, HP, and TI chip tooling Western Electric and GE parts to Delco auto. parts to Peerless and Price Phister faucet valve parts to Space Shuttle parts to Patriot Missle parts, to armour producing tooling for the bottom of Military Humvies and Helicopters to shirt button tooling (Arrow) to Fishing pole tooling to "have you had a soft drink from McD's, Burger King or 7-11 etc. parts" (syrup and water pistons and sleeves) to kidney machines to blood machines (Cobe lab)...to good old endline tooling (beer can pop tops) and on and on.....I ("we") used, almost exclusivly all sorts of various grades of carbide toolbits on everything from leadloy to crs to prehard to air hardening to oil hardening, to copper and elconite to brass...on and on...same principles on/as/of edge sharpness, toughness, wear etc. and why tooling made with carbide produces up to 1 million + parts (my record on 1 Texas Instrument Toolset before it was trash LOL (170 hrs to build , fits in a shoebox) compared to the same toolset out of hard tool steel faces (30,000 parts then trash plus it starts wearing more immediatly)...
FYI the binders in carbides (which is pressed) go from between a mix of 6% cobalt (harder than the hubs of hell, brittle, imeasurable except with metalurgy, will destroy a diamond point and won't even make a mark with a hardness tester) (% of cobalt, more or less, is the indicating factor in the hardness of carbides) to 24% that is soft down to around rc64, almost like HSS and the best toolsteels but will "micro" contaminate everything it cuts and rubs against...There's, let me guestimate, over a 2 dozen grades (choices) of carbides (isostaticly pressed or not) for different applications.
Carbide baby! "Can't touch this" (Well, only diamond and electricity through "fancy copper" and wire will touch it right)...Another Smiley face here!
(Uh oh, is this a friendly......ing contest over cutter material? (Yoose' know there's also newer TTZ Ceramic cutter material and braze on diamond too?!!)...
But OK and all, I'm done with this "thread" now (Hey, I heard that!)