Karl Townsend wrote:

snip

.. How would I go
about finding out what material to use?

Karl


People with a lot of experience can grind a sample of the metal and
tell you the alloy family by viewing the sparks. The resiliency tells
me it may be a high vanadium steel such as the M series used to make
good drill bits. Perhaps a metallurgist could perform a tensile test
and a Rockwell hardness test and cross reference the results against a
catalogue of steels with the same tensile strength at that hardness.