eSCHEn
Bit Wrangler
- Messages
- 6,136
- Location
- SW Scotland
Thanks for that hotrodder, very interesting. I did read a pdf you'd posted a while back with technical characteristics on tungstens and it was really good.I doubt there's much in it with regards to the usual suspects from SWP, Parweld etc that are only gonna stick their name on the packaging. AIUI outside of China* there's not even a handful of tungsten electrode manufacturers... Plansee in Austria, Wolfram Industries in Germany and Sylvania in the States. You won't find any UK sources offering them online, at least not with prices unless you pick up the phone. Elmer Wallace (used to at least) only supply Plansee tungstens, Diamondground have a UK sales office and do a massive range with tungsten sourced from Plansee, Wolfram or Sylvania
Arczone is an online American supplier who sell all of them along with HFT multistrikes if you want a very rough comparison of price in $, for example Wolfram 2% lanthanated are barely any cheaper than HFT which FWIW are a mix of lanthana, ceria and yttria
* Obviously Chinese and cheapnese are two different things but often price is the only clue and not a reliable one... I'd expect Binzel to care more about quality/their reputation than SWP for example who might just buy stuff from whoever is the cheapest at the time. Dunno whether Binzel tungstens are any different except for packaging or price though and have no idea where they source, say, 2% lanthanated from. Alongside the usual flavours Binzel do a purple coded flavour called E3 which is a slightly different mix to the HFT and usually sold as Radnor E3 in the states. Both these mixed flavours are allegedly made in China, FWIW i only ended up trying (and then sticking with the HFT) after getting a pack of zirconiated Parweld, SWP or unbranded/whatever that behaved like thoriated does with AC and split
I've been using Super Six as, well, that's what I can pick up locally in a pack of ten. I do wonder if some of the issues I've had are to do with poorer quality tungstens from them. I'll grab a couple of the HFTs and see whether I notice any improvement.