Tungsten Carbide Guitar Pick

This is a guitar pick, made out of Tungsten Carbide.

Tungsten Carbide is incredibly hard (something like 90RC, while the edge of a really good Katana is 60RC and a stone chisel, 50RC) and is very resistant to scratching. It only melts or softens at an extremely high temperature, so it's usually used to make metal cutting tools for machinery.

To give you an idea of how hard it is (hardness in the engineering world refers to how difficult it is to scratch), attempting to file it down with a metal file will result in the file losing its teeth. Emery cloth and sandpaper will simply slide across it harmlessly.

The only way for me to shape this pick was by grinding it with Silicon Carbide 'green wheels' on a pedestal grinder. It took the better part of two hours to get a square-shaped piece of Carbide into the shape you see here. The downside to Tungsten Carbide is that it is brittle. Although it is difficult to scratch, its high hardness means it is much easier to shatter, chip, or crack.

I made this piece out of an indexable Carbide insert. Normally you're supposed to braze these things to steel bars so they can be used as cutting tools. This saves the carbide for the edge and only the edge, so it saves on material and on costs.

It's quite thick and heavy (Tungsten Carbide is heavier than lead), but on guitar strings it sounds awesome. The sound is very thick, bright and metallic, and although it wears the strings down rapidly, the sound it gives is just too great for me to pass up.

I might start selling these if the idea catches on.