Carbidize Brass?

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petah

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Jul 22, 2008
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We often see people carbidizing TI, has anyone tried brass? or other metals? Beryllium?

It would be pretty sweet to have a forged brass knife with Carbide blade.
 
Beryllium - Why not arsenic , or depleted uranium, or maybe polonium?

Beryllium is very poisonous. Don't try and make a blade from beryllium brass/bronze.
 
Other than the "sweet" factor, what would the advantage be?

Titanium makes sense, it's light, tough, and nearly corrosion proof. If it hardened and held an edge like steel, we wouldn't need steel. I'm a big fan of carbidized Ti, within it's potential usage parameters, but it's not a replacement for steel in the vast majority of cutting tasks.

It's a specialized product, which excels at a very finite number of applications. I can personally see no advantage to using bronze, brass or anything else as a base metal over titanium. I also don't see any reason to carbidize steel edges in most(maybe all) cases.

Carbide impregnated, and solid carbide, btw, are two very very different things in use.
 
The use of beryllium metal presents technical challenges due to the toxicity (especially by inhalation) of beryllium-containing dusts. Beryllium is corrosive to tissue, and can cause a chronic life-threatening allergic disease called berylliosis in some people
 
Just for fun I made a copper knife and impregnated the edge with carbides it, it made 6 cuts on my rope. That was more than some steel blades can make. Brass may have worked better but I did not have any I wanted to waste.
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Thank you all for the response. Ed thank you for sharing your experience. I thought it would look rather neat to have a bronze/copper blade. I love my TI but I just wanted to be different. If bronze is significantly worse than TI then I'd never invest in it. Thanks!!
 
Bronze is fine for making a knife. It gets fairly hard with hammering and burnishing. It might even take a carbide edge? But please don't use a beryllium alloy of bronze or copper.
 
I have considered this too, maybe I will make something just for fun. Carbidized Aluminum budget line! just kidding there but the concept is interesting

off topic - My old friend owns one of only four commercial beryllium ore claims in the US if I recall correctly. He mines a very small amount (I think actually it may be surface collecting) each year to sell as lapidary rough. It is just beautiful material and can be a really bright purple or a cool fractured and healed crackly look. This is ore and not pure content so it is supposed to be safe to work with. (not for knives, lol I'm way off subject here!) The Tiffany Co owned a claim near it a long time ago and it is often known as Tiffany stone.

I am not sure if he can mine it anymore, I forget if they had closed the area off or not.
 
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You might check out the hardness of zinc carbide, copper carbide, and tin carbide. You might be able to use casenite and you might end up with a hardening line. Let us know how it turns out if you decide to try it?
 
Hi Guys
I worked in aerospace for 27 yrs and i have worked with beryllium many times in the past and it will mess you up......we worked in a controled area with many types of metals and some as much as $500.00 a inch with a OD of .500 There are many types of materials that havent hit the open market yet and I am sure it will be many years before they do.....because they are controled by the goverment for nasa and the military...
 
bladsmth said:
Beryllium - Why not arsenic , or depleted uranium, or maybe polonium?

Beryllium is very poisonous. Don't try and make a blade from beryllium brass/bronze.
Click to expand...

I think a bronze knife would be interesting at the very least. It probably wouldn't hold an edge for very long, but it was used for blades in the past.
 
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