Tool steel
W1 Tool Steel
Manufacturer or standards-body identification; product values do not apply to every form or condition.
Identity / state reference
What distinguishes this material
The cited W1 product is cold-drawn water-hardening drill rod with a supplier-specific carbon range; it does not establish every W1 product variant.
- Designation in this reference
- W1
- Forms covered by the sources
- Buffalo Precision cold-drawn drill rod.
- States to distinguish or confirm
- Cold drawing describes the supply route; actual annealed/hardened state requires the supplier specification.
- Temperature and exposure
- No universal service-temperature limit or room-temperature property set is assigned. Use the cited product document and the purchase certificate.
Property evidence for a stated condition
No condition-specific numerical table is reproduced here
The linked sources establish the identity and the stated product/state scope. Obtain the row for your actual form, section, treatment and test conditions before adopting strength, hardness or a thermal limit.
Resolve these conditions next
- What product standard, edition and complete grade are on the material certificate?
- What product form, section size and delivery/heat-treatment condition will be machined?
For machining, take the exact grade, supplied condition and measured hardness where applicable into the tool maker’s application data. A generic material-family speed is not a substitute for an operation and tool-specific recommendation.
Sources and what they establish
Reviewed 23 October 2026. A source’s publication date and the review date are different. The scope below identifies the fields checked.
Buffalo Precision AISI W1 drill rod
Supplier’s cold-drawn water-hardening drill rod product; not all W1 chemistry/carbon variants.
Buffalo Precision AISI W1 drill rod ↗Source identity, a named product example and a supplied-batch certificate are different evidence. Cross-standard similarity does not approve substitution.
Corrections from the previous article
- Do not treat a commercial drill-rod carbon band as every W1 composition or assign one final HRC to all section sizes.
- Withdraw the legacy generic hardness (190–220 HB (annealed)) and tensile-strength (1,380 MPa (200 ksi) hardened) pair: the old page does not establish a matching product, heat treatment, section and test source.
- Remove the unsupported cutting-speed table and machinability percentage; select tooling only after the actual material condition is known.
Other references in Tool steel
Related references, not equivalent substitutes.