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OT "Government steel"

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partsproduction

Titanium
Joined
Aug 22, 2011
Location
Oregon coast
Watching youtube recently in several lock sport (Lock picking for fun) videos the subject of making picks came up, nothing of any great mystery until the videographer mentioned "government steel" as being the best material to make picks out of.
Intrigued by this I watched enough to find out that he was calling 420 stainless government steel (I never did find out why or where the term came from).

So I wondered if that's just a niche term, like the gun people call any aluminum alloy receiver an "Alloy" receiver, though of course all steel or brass parts are also alloy, as are cast bullets an alloy of lead and tin.

Have any of you heard of 420 stainless being called government steel?
Thanks, just wondering.
parts
 
It's new to me. But I think people selling "billet" parts are Philistines, unless they happen to work at a major forge or rolling mill.

If people will call rolled stock "billet", they could call almost anything "government steel". Maybe they meant "government steal", as in G-job, not a political commentary.
 
At the lab we had surplus slabs of battleship armor. Roughly 12"x24" X 30 feet long. Did not work out for the intended new use, because they were not flat enough. so they got used for retaining walls. The government did not want to pay shipping back. Not worth the wages and fuel to cut them to fit in the furnace.
Bill D
 
Gotta love it when a single group of people adopt their own nomenclature, I think the gun people's "Alloy" migrated from car cult members calling aluminum alloy wheels "Alloy", just as they also call parts milled from solid "billet".
 
Don't forget military grade Submarine Aluminum. Used to make the screen doors for the sub fleet. The poor Soviet union had to make do with titanium.
Bill D
 
Lock pick makers specify it as 420 stainless aka Peterson stainless other than that the description is meaningless as governments specify thousands of grades of steel, HSLA, tool, mil spec, etc etc a non gov body also specs steel for them aka Lloyds spec for ships, there’s a book like a telephone directory for power station confinement vessels and pressure vessels plus ISO and DIN we subscribed to, the ASME section of our library was 45’ long 7’ high of US specs
( new revision books came in a van of crates)
Mark
 
Perhaps because making lock picks is probably 90% of the time a "Government Job" which is slang for working on your personal shit at the shop.
Just guessing here
 
From the wikipedia article on Stainless Steel:

While seeking a corrosion-resistant alloy for gun barrels in 1912, Harry Brearley of the Brown-Firth research laboratory in Sheffield, England, discovered and subsequently industrialized a martensitic stainless steel alloy, today known as AISI Type 420.[24] The discovery was announced two years later in a January 1915 newspaper article in The New York Times.[12]

Stainless steel - Wikipedia

Was the "lock sporter" based in the UK?
 
SteelrFn said:
Perhaps because making lock picks is probably 90% of the time a "Government Job" which is slang for working on your personal shit at the shop.
Just guessing here
Click to expand...

I think this is it. ^^^^^^^^^

Or its like gubmit cheese.
Who knows?
 
Interesting to see at the tour of a local winery all the pumps and piping is stainless. Most pumps made in Italy. So why not drunken stainless grade? I would prefer to use dairy metal for it's high silver content.
Bill D
 
I have an Armory steel barrel 12ga single barrel shotgun. I don't know the brand of hand.

these were mainly produced by Crescent arms in new york and were made between 1902 and 1918 genuine armory steel refers to the barrel not being made of damascus they were inexpensive feild grade shotguns and are still usable with light loads
 
It sounds like a better selling point rather then a real nickname.

Like aircraft aluminum and food grade stainless, it's a huge range.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk
 
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