Carbide Bushings vs. Steel Bushings

What is better tungsten carbide bushings or heat treated steel bushings? We did our research, looked

Raven Carbide Bushings

at materials, talked to end users and spoke with manufacturers and here's what The Carbide Die Blog discovered about the steel verses carbide bushings.

First off, there isn't a lot of hard data on it, at least not available to the public online. Apparently most companies aren't posting their results from any internal findings. We decided to go straight to the manufacturer and asked one of the leading bushing manufacturers their thoughts. Raven Carbide Die, llc responded and came in on the side of carbide bushings stating, they are "very comfortable saying that our tungsten carbide bushings will last over 10 times as long as steel bushings used in the same application. Depending on the application tungsten carbide can last up to 50 times as long as steel."

Let's take a comparative look at carbide vrs steel bushings using that 10x number. For example when comparing typical press-fit bushings, paying $14.00 for a steel bushing compared to $7.00 for steel will generate a real cost savings of $56 per carbide bushing. ($7 x 10 minus $14) In addition your company will save on labor and by having less production downtime, as bushings are needed to be replaced 10 times less often and production is not halted while bushings are changed.

According to Dan Raven at Raven Carbide Die, "It can be simplified, I've heard it said that carbide is three times as hard as steel and twice as dense. I've also heard tungsten carbide described as the second hardest thing on earth after diamonds, and although this isn't exactly true, you can only cut carbide dies with diamonds."

It's difficult to find exact differences in wear qualities, and this is even more complicated since they use a different scale for tungsten carbide (HRA) vs. Steel (HRC) and there are different grades of both materials but generally speaking on an HRA scale carbide is 83-93 HRA while the hardest heat treated steel is 61-81 HRA.

Basically the wear properties of carbide make carbide bushings the superior product for production, for example in high tech industries like aerospace tungsten carbide bushings are the standard. Steel bushings are less expensive though and they could be the better choice for very short run operations or one time jobs where the project/operation is completed before the bushings wear properties become a factor.

Hopefully this helps clear things up! Please let us  know if you have any questions in the comments below.

By Kana Vic1/23/2020Special thanks to Dan at Raven Carbide Die llc, who can be found on the web at www.RavenCarbideDie.com