It's Tungsten carbide - amazingly hard.
Not so sure this is a good choice of materials for this particular part. I have a lot of experience with Tungsten, and also with Tungsten carbide - 2 very different things with different properties and most people don't really understand the difference. Where Tungsten (Wolfram) is very tough and will take a lot of abuse, Tungsten carbide is much more brittle.
I use Tungsten carbide for cutting tools on my lathe (the gravers are made from this material) and it is very prone to chipping. I have a small Tungsten carbide tool I made with a brass handle I turned in the lathe and drilled, then I inserted a tungsten carbide piece in the end of it and used it as a scriber - fell on the concrete floor and the tip was shattered. I've also worked with carbide cutting tools when I was buying and installing CNC machining equipment in my former job - very wear resistant, but brittle and not good with shocks.
Tungsten on the other hand I used in these:
The points:
Tungsten is very dense, so it helps with % FOC when tuning the arrows to your bow (a challenge when shooting X10's)...they also hold up way better than steel points do. If you happened to hit something imbedded into the target, or hit something behind the target on a pass through, it was very unusual to see damage on these points.
They were tough to get when the US invaded Iraq in 2003, as the military was using all this material (and keeping the manufacturer busy) making ammunition with it...
Using tungsten carbide on a fairly thin component like a bezel...well we'll have to see how this stands up. Other manufacturers have made entire cases out of it, but the case designs I've seen where quite sturdy and had a lot of cross section, where a bezel will not. I would not give it great odds if you smacked the bezel on a metal door frame while walking through it. Once the parts show up on the Extranet, I'll have to see what the replacement cost is like. Not likely cheap.
Cheers, Al
