So, all steels are the same then?
Quite the opposite, but you have to look at the mechanical properties at play.
3V has good shock characteristics and high wear resistance, but batoning through soft metal doesn't significantly use either of those properties.
You're just driving a wedge through a softer medium, you can cut tinfoil with a razor blade and see no damage, the only reason smashing the same knife on a block of aluminum will destroy the blade is that the wedging forces become too high, and you're not nearly precise enough to apply force perfectly in the correct direction. It's the same amount of wear (per area of contact with the edge) in either case, but tinfoil has no structure surrounding the area with pressure being applied to it, and so it moves out of the way very easily.
It's the surrounding material that makes a block of iron hard to cut, not the initial contact point itself.
(I should note that in my OLFA vs. 154CM case I'm pretty sure than the carbon steel OLFA blade is just heat treated to a slightly higher hardness. I've heard that you can use a set of files of a known hardness to determine the hardness of another metal object. As soon as you use a file of the same hardness it stops cutting efficiently.)
Last edited: