Just to briefly touch back on my original post, “Where To Buy Tool Steel and How To Get It Cheap”, I wanted to go ahead and drop a link to my other website cheaptoolsteel.com for you guys. It is still under construction, but is useable right now.
Why’d I build it?
I manually scanned all of Amazon’s listings for tool steel and linked to the cheapest diameters that are close to standard sizes.
For example:
For O1, I found two diameters — .484 and .515 — that are really close (almost imperceptibly close, without a measuring instrument) and MUCH cheaper than using .500 diameter — or true 1/2″ stock.
Hopefully it is obvious that these two diameters won’t work for a shaft that is meant to run through bearings with a .500 hole… these are for forging knives and tools!
Now we can’t circumvent all the crap that comes with trying to scan Amazon’s crappy grid of items, which seems to be set up an in random order. If you do need a size that I don’t have listed for on cheaptoolsteel.com, just click “See all 80 in this Product Family“.
That said, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- I’m still working on the site, so be sure to check it (or bookmark it or whatever) frequently… this project will take a little while.
- Some of the alloys seem to buck the trend as far as the “standard sizes” costing more than the “non-standard” sizes… In these cases, I just linked to the actual standard size. In this case, W1 is cheaper in .500, (while still being quite a bit more than the O1 size equivalents).
- Also, please keep in mind that I’m an affiliate for Amazon, so when you click through the links to the listings for these steels, I get a few since, for which I would like to say a big THANKS! I don’t plan on ever having the website pay for itself completely this way, but anything helps! So, thanks again!
That’s all I have for tonight! If you missed my last post of Torbjörn Åhman forging tongs, check it out here (and check out Joey Van Der Steeg’s video on forging tongs here while you’re at it.) Definitely some good perspective and filming in those two videos!