The Ultimate Buyer's Guide for Purchasing High-Performance Alloy Tool Steel

AISI

Stands for American Iron and Steel Institute. The institute serves as the voice of the North American steel industry. AISI numbers are used to categorize metals by alloy type and carbon content, and they do it with four digits. The first two digits of an AISI number refer to the alloy type, and the second two digits refer to carbon content.

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ALLOY

A metal made by combining two or more metallic elements. An alloy typically possesses qualities different from those of the components used to create it.

ASM

Stands for American Society for Metals. ASM International is the world’s largest association of metal material engineers and scientists. The association engages and connects materials professionals and their organizations to the resources necessary to solve problems, improve outcomes, and advance society.

ASTM

Stands for American Society for Testing and Materials. ASTM International is a not-for-profit organization that develops standards for materials, products, systems, and services. Metal with an ASTM designation meets the international standards for quality and regulations.

CUT-TO-LENGTH

This process levels coil into a flat sheet or blank. The service provides better length and width tolerances than sheared product, and it can improve diagonal tolerances as well.

DEBURRING

Cutting metals can leave behind burrs, which are unwanted raised edges or protrusions. Deburring is the process of removing these burrs with a tool.

DRAWING

Drawing is a metalworking process that uses tensile forces to stretch metal. As the metal is drawn, it stretches thinner, into a desired shape and thickness.

DRAWING TEMPERATURE

Drawing is usually done at room temperature, classifying it as a cold working process. However, it may be performed at elevated temperatures during special applications like on large wires, rods, or hollow sections in order to reduce forces.

ELONGATION

A metal fabricating term that refers to the degree to which a material can be bent, stretched, or compressed before rupturing. A metal’s elongation is a point between tensile strength and yield strength, and it is typically expressed as a percentage of the original length.

GAUGE

The thickness of sheet metal in the USA is commonly specified by a traditional, non-linear measure known as its gauge. The larger the gauge number, the thinner the metal.

HEAT LOTS OR HEAT NUMBER

A heat number is an identification number that is stamped on a material plate to prove it meets industry quality standards which require materials to be tested by the manufacturer. The heat lot or heat number is used to identify production runs for quality control purposes.

EDGE ROLLING

Edge rolling is the process of adding finishing edges to metal. It forms the edge of a strip to the desired shape beyond that of a standard slit edge.

MIL STD

Stands for Military Standard. This classification establishes uniform engineering and technical requirements for military-unique or substantially modified commercial processes, procedures, practices, and methods. In order to qualify, materials have undergone rugged, exact testing, equal to the exigencies of combat use.

NORMALIZING TEMPERATURE

Normalization is a heat treatment that relieves stress on steel to improve ductility and toughness in steel that may harden after the cold working process. During normalization, steel is warmed to a temperature just above its upper critical point. Normalized heat treatment facilitates a more uniform final product.

ROCKWELL SCALE

The Rockwell Scale indicates the hardness of materials. Rockwell hardness numbers are most often used to describe the hardness of metals, although they are also used for some plastics. The Rockwell scale is based on measuring the depth of the indentation made by pressing a diamond point into a material.

SAE

Stands for Society of Automotive Engineers. SAE International is a global association of engineers and related technical experts in the aerospace, automotive, and commercial-vehicle industries. Materials meeting SAE standards are internationally recognized for safety, quality, and effectiveness.

SLITTING

Slitting is a precise shearing process, but instead of making cuts at the end of a workpiece like shearing, slitting cuts a wide coil of metal into a number of narrower coils as the main coil is moved through the slitter. During the slitting process, the metal coil passes lengthwise through the slitter’s circular blades.

TEMPER

Temper refers to reheating hardened, normalized, or mechanically worked steel to a temperature below the critical range to soften it and improve impact strength. Tempering results in greater toughness by decreasing an alloy’s hardness.

TENSILE STRENGTH

The maximum stress a material will withstand before fracturing or breaking. The ultimate tensile strength is calculated from the maximum load applied during the test, divided by the original cross-sectional area.

UNS DESIGNATION/NUMBER

Stands for the Unified Numbering System for Metals and Alloys. UNS designation provides a means of correlating internationally used metal and alloy numbering systems currently administered by societies, trade associations, and those individual users and producers of metals and alloys. This system is meant to avoid the confusion caused by using more than one identification number for the same metal or alloy, and the opposite situation of having the same number assigned to two or more different metals or alloys.

YIELD STRENGTH

The amount of stress a material can withstand before causing permanent deformity.

Automakers are using more and more high-strength steel, but what does that term even mean?

Aluminum is not the only light-weight material well suited for the construction of Automobiles. Car-makers have been turning to increased use of  high-strength steel in vehicles for many years. The objectives of using high-strength steel include better performance of critical safety parts, such as A-pillars, lower weight from key structural components in both space-frame and unit-body constructed vehicles, and of course, lower cost for manufacturers and consumers who make and buy the vehicles.

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A recent report by Markets and Markets says that the high-strength steel market is to grow by about 8% per year through . By then, the market should be about 21 billion U.S. dollars globally. The report says that the automotive market is the number one user of high-strength steels and that Asia Pacific is the largest user by region. Let’s look at what this material is, and why so many car makers are trumpeting its use.

High Strength Steel – What Exactly Is It?

Steel is an iron alloy.  That means it is a mixture of more than one metal and other elements; unlike say the metal we know of as copper, which is just the element copper. Steel is almost all iron by weight, but it has small amounts of carbon and other materials in it.

At the atomic level, the additional elements change the way the material behaves in dramatic fashion. The way the carbon is managed during the production of steel is also key to its properties. One way to think of high-strength steel is to think of it as low-carbon steel. In conventional steel, the carbon content is about 1.4%. In high-strength steel it is about 1/6th that amount.

Here’s a good primer on steel if you want to dive deeper.

Engineering students who study materials science spend years gaining a full understanding of what “strength” of a metal means. The material’s resistance to being pulled and how well it performs in shear are key to this. The specific strength of a material is where the term high-strength steel (also called high-tensile strength steel) comes from. In a nutshell, a high-strength steel is an alloy that has better performance per unit of weight.

Another way to think about it is high-strength steel alloys can do what lower strength (sometimes call mild steel) steel alloys can do, but with less material, or with a lower weight. In our top graphic Mazda brags that its steel is “…the thinnest in its class.” Can you imagine an automaker doing that back in the s?

Where is High Strength Steel Used and Why Use Low-Strength Steel At All?

The above graphic is a perfect illustration of how automakers use varying materials and varying grades of steel throughout a vehicle. Can you guess which automaker created this handy guide? Yes, it is Ford, who has become so well known for its advertisements touting its use of aluminium in its trucks.

As you can see, the high-strength, more expensive steel is used primarily in the structural parts of this unit-body hatchback car. Think of the high-strength steel as a sort of skeleton, onto which less expensive, easier to work with materials are hung, joined, or mated to.

Lower weight is always a benefit for automakers, so high-strength steels are used in parts of a car where automakers can get the best bang for the buck.

What Are the Downsides of High Strength Steel?

High-strength steel alloys cost more to manufacture. Not only is the alloy harder to create in its raw form, it is also harder to work with. Stamping it and forming it is harder. More energy and stronger tools, dies, and presses are required, and those tools and dies wear out faster.

So automakers use it sparingly, but as fuel economy and safety levels continue to be set higher, more of the steel, or more accurately the metal, in a vehicle is becoming specialized.

Aside from being more expensive as a base material, and also more expensive to work with, the high-strength steel alloys generally used in a vehicle are not inert, meaning they can and will rust. So special care in their anti-corrosion preparation is required.

This is also the reason why automakers don’t usually use expensive steel alloys in places prone to rust. Body panels and floor pans, for example, would be a poor choice for the material.

High-strength alloys are also much harder to reform after an accident. If you find yourself in an accident that bends the difficult to re-shape A-pillar, the B-pillar, or the roof, the vehicle is very likely totaled.

Notice that in the front of the example vehicle above, the front bumper component is an individual part.  It would be replaced in a minor crash.

Future Materials

The on-going debate between GM and Ford about which metal is best for a truck bed in the F-150 or Silverado is sort of silly. Other automakers have already moved on to corrosion-free, high-strength plastics.

Carbon fiber is becoming less expensive and is finding its way into more mainstream and more affordable cars. GM has, and still does, use non-metallic body panels for cars, and that trend will return to popularity as consumers come to expect rust-free and easy to repair body panels on longer-lasting vehicles.

Fun fantasy note: The Valyrian steel mentioned in Game of Thrones, would likely be special not because of its raw materials, but because of how it was forged and worked. The ripples would be from varying types of steel forged into one blade that were strong in the middle, to prevent breaking, and hard at the edges, to stay sharp and resist chipping.

Melt down a Valyrian steel blade and re-make it the way other swords are made at “modern Kings Landing”, and the special advantages should be lost, but in the show, they’re retained.

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