I don't know this kind of punch for sure, but it may be corroborating my gut feel in post #3. If you can find a commercial version of what you are trying to do just to get a get a feel for how they are made, that would be helpful. The 'serious equipment' part isn't so much the machining, its the heat treating in order to get both hardness & toughness because punches & shears are in kind of a demanding environment. Otherwise its like making a knife blade out of cold rolled steel. It may be shiny & shaped right & initially have a razor sharp edge. But after only a few cuts it will be dull. So instead dicing 100 tomatoes, you only get 10 & then must be resharpened. You might be able to make 'some' or 'many' acceptable shims with unhardened components. But 100 or 200... who can say without more knowledge or experimenting. If the real kits have these features then its that way for a reason. Only you will know that by experimenting.
But just using the disc cutter as an example. When they say t
he punches are oil-quenched tool steel that have been drawn for hardness and durability.
So this is called tool steel or drill rod like the stuff at KBC I mentioned to you elsewhere. You would turn it down to specific diameter & finish in a lathe. The way it comes is ready for machining, called annealed condition. The only way I see this being hardened in a low budget home shop environment is to torch heat the business end orange red. There is a specific temperature but budget folks use a magnet. When it doesn't stick, its at the minimum temp. Then quickly quench it. If its type W the quench medium is water. If its type O the quench medium is oil. Now the cutting edge is very hard, unfortunately impracticably hard like glass. Now you must temper the rod to draw back the hardness to desired number. The link shows some real world examples. So that would be typically an oven that could reach say 450-deg & that yield a certain hardness number, say 60. I'm just giving the big picture here but heat treating is a science in itself. There are YouTube videos out there along with the usual caveats. Now after our shop HT we hope it doesn't distort from the quench and we hope it doesn't grow after HT out of spec & we hope it still has a decent finish... etc. Maybe you will be OK. In the industrial world they don't leave this to chance. They assume any & all of these things will occur & plan on finish grinding the hardened part. That would be difficult to do in home shop without a toolpost grinder.
https://stampingworld.com/technicaldatafiles/Techdata-Toolsteel hardness.pdf
When they say t
he base is case-hardened and ground that is pretty much what I was referencing with the 4140 suggestion. Case hardening is a heat material to red but then dip/apply a carbon compound powder or goop. You get this at machinery or gunsmiths suppliers. We will assume you wont grind the base because you don't have a surface grinder.
https://www.brownells.com/gunsmith-...ing/surface-hardening-compound-prod27119.aspx
Possibly you could case harden your pins & skip the quenching method but I rather doubt it. CH is more for sliding action hardness because penetration is very shallow.
So I don't want to scare you off but its also important to know why certain things are made a certain way. The trick is to to figure out IF corners can be cut in home shop environment & if so what parameters can be relaxed that you can live with. Maybe they initially come out perfect & edge degrades after 10. I really cant say. If you found a tool that was making nice ones in the qty you are looking at, that would be a huge start to reference from. Maybe for softer shim materials its more about the mechanism & pin/hole relative dimensions & finish for shearing action. Again, we can only speculate.