First of all I do not necessarily know that much more that any other good minds that are present, I may have made a few more mistakes than others and dedicated myself to learning as much as I could from them, there are some pretty sharp guys here and they seem to be steering you in a good direction.
One of the biggest mistakes I made and learned from was automatically listening to other knife makers about the best way to treat the steel in contradiction to the folks who made the steel. Heat treating is not a popularity contest, the steel really doesn't give a hoot about how many knife makers agree upon a method nor how well known the advice giver may be. You will also hear many platitudes along the lines of "there's more than one way to skin a cat! the steel also doesnt give a rip about cleaver sayings or folksy slogans. This concept may work for blade shaping and feline fur processing, but there are very definite methods for the best outcome in any given alloy and it is not all that open to debate- once again, the steel doesnt care about out opinions.
The other biggest mistake I have made is to fall into the trap of feeling I know all I needed to know about the results. Knifemaker testing is notoriously subjective and misleading, and the greatest downfall of many a knifemaker are the words
and it is working just fine for me! Most knife use taps into perhaps 20% of the steels potential so there is a huge range of lost or added performance that is never revealed. So when we say that there is no difference between the blades with soak and those without, it absolutely necessitates the question how do we know this? It skates a file the same? It saws the same amount of rope? It whittles the same amount of wood? Entirely different numbers could be obtained simply by putting the knife in a different hand or sharpening in a slightly different way.
The only safe and logical thing we can do is rely upon the recommendations of the folks who made the steel and exhaustively tested it to determine who to treat it. The problem that comes about with knife makers it that they do not always possess the tools to nail the heat treating the way the specs lay out, but this does not give us the freedom to simply write out own rules and then bend reality to suit the results. Virtually every big bladesmiths super heat treating secret method that I have studied has ended up simply being a way to get a little bit closer to the heat treat that would have resulted using the tools and methods laid down by the industry that created it.
Soak is almost always good as long as you have control. Lacking the tools to do this there are some good ways to come close, here is what I would do with 1095:
After all forging operations, normalize carefully starting hot to put everything into solution and then quick air cooling, next heat to just above non magnetic and perhaps quench or another quick air cool, then on the third heat only go to glowing but never allowing the steel to lose magnetism before the final air cool. What this did is put all the carbon into play, then trap it into very small particles throughout followed by putting into superfine spheres throughout a soft matrix, allowing you to do you grinding and shaping.
For the final heat treatment if you set things up well you can eliminate much of the soak and only put enough of that carbon into solution to reach full harness while leaving the rest in the form of evenly distributed and very hard particles in the hardened matrix- think hard, fine gravel in concrete.
The proper temperature for this should be around 1475F, the magnet stops sticking at around 1414F, and yes the extra 61F does make a difference! If you are totally eliminating the soak it would be worthwhile to go closer to 1500F as long as you go no higher, but if you had that kind of control you could just soak it.
The quickest way to notice the difference between no soak and a proper one is in the tempering. With no soak you will reach HRC59- 60 very quickly after going above 400F or perhaps even well below it, folks who are tempering high carbon steels at 375F and not getting chipping or other over hardness issues are definitely not getting a proper soak. 1095 taken to 65-66 HRC after a proper soak could go higher than 500F in the temper and steel end up with workable knife hardness levels.
I hope this helps clear some of the mud from the water
