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  • not arguing just trying to understand - how do we know that? which metals are good and which bad?

    afaik most locks only specify "steel"

    Ok, steel is the name of a group of metal alloys based on Iron, with a range of properties depending on what metals make it up, what amount of carbon is folded into it and how it's forged/quenched.
    Steel includes a cheap 501 frame in my garage which I bent the top tube of with my thigh (so relatively soft) right up to the padlock on the garage door, which I tryed to hacksaw through once and just managed to blunt two hacksaw blades (also steel).
    The long bendy lock above is titanium, which is softer than steel, but also lighter (gross over simplification) also a lot more expensive.
    There's also tungsten, which is harder than iron and makes harder steels, you may have heard if tungsten carbide, which is really a ceramic, which is very very hard. Not sure if you can get tungsten alloy locks...they'd probably be very expensive and heavy.
    And a couple of other metals which are no good on their own, but when added to steels change the properties in useful ways (chromium, magnesium) does that help with your question?

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