"alderotes" wrote in message
om...

I believe it's a medium carbon steel. I haven't seen it referred to
as tool steel.

In metallurgy class, we were taught that any 1xxx steel is "carbon steel".

A steel starting with other numbers (like the infamous 4140) would be an
alloy steel (of course there are lots of different types of "alloy steel").

Traditional tool steels start with A (air-hardening), D (die), H (hot work),
O (oil-hardening), S (shock resistant), M (Molybdenum), T (Tungsten), P
(plastic moulds), W (water-hardening), etc. I'm sure I'm missing a few. And
then there's the newer tool steels that have odd designations that don't
mean anything to me right now... CVRxxxx or some such...

I could see 1144 being a "tooling steel" which is probably a wishy-washy
term used by cheap toolmakers ;-)

I'm sure Ed (and others) can chime in and prove me wrong, however...

Regards,

Robin