Bias against ATS-34...Please enlighten me

BigJimSlade said:
a unique combination of high wear resistance, high corrosion resistance, good impact toughness, and excellent polishability.
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Another one of those.....:rolleyes: . Sounds to me like a lot of hype. What exactly is "good impact toughness" and "excellent polishability". S30V is already difficult to polish, what is one to expect from a steel with higher carbide volume, just as much vanadium and even more chromium. And what exactly do they call "fine grained"? But I am not surprised at the high wear resistance, I grant them that.

Maybe it's just me, but I am not biting.
 
If you have checked out a XM-18 review I think you will find the people with the steel in hand have been very pleased to date. I have yet to hear an actual criticism of the steel but they will come. The fact is that the newer steel have been ballancing those traits that before came with sacraficing another (there will always be comprimise but with better steel it lessens). S30V is not hard to polish really but looks better with a hand rub in most maker and buyers opinions. It has been called hard to sharpen and I did use to have trouble with it but got a better stone and now have no issues. An extra minute over another steel doesnt really bother me, especially when I can wait four times as long to sharpen again. Composition wise 20cv is a very sound SS tool steel from my limited knowledge of metalurgy. Also Hinderer is a working fire fighter and I know he has avery real testing ground and a responisibilty to his coworkers. I am saving up to order a batch of this steel myself and will have to decide from there just how good it is. I havent heard anyone say anything bad about it except for makers that aernt using it making remarks, wich is common. I'm shure time will fully flush out its issues and benefits. Many people complain about D2 and some of its traits but in the hands of someone like dozier is hard to argue with the results. Another benefit of vandium steels is the way they react to cryo.
 
Well, I guess it depends what you are looking for. The composition isn't that much different from S30V that I wouldn't expect any breakthrough relevations with this steel. As for not sacrificing properties....Sure steels get better but the huge carbide volume will help neither toughness nor edgestability and I have yet to see data according to which a stainless steel can play in the same league with common HC steels toughness wise, I also have yet to see images that show a PM steel with carbide sizes of a common tool steel such as O1. So to me this is just the next of a series of high wear steels. I am sure they are getting better and I am not saying that it is a bad steel. I like ZDP-189 very much for example. But it is hardly anything that I need to watch :yawn:.

What do I know, but IMHO the future is really in relatively simple steels like 13C27 or in the new PH steels like H1. But hey that is just me.

Oh, and I am not the only one who says that S30V is difficult to polish. If you compare the standard finish on a Spyderco S30V versus a VG10 blade than that alone tells you something about the polishability of S30V.
 
Standard finish is dictated by what looks good. S30V doent polish up as nice imo but i have polished it and it polishes just like any other steel. The grit in the compounds cuts and therefore polishes. It may take a little time but believe me there are steels with much much worse grindability than S30V, try CPM-M4 for example,a non stainless. Also I agree that a steel like 01 gives alot of bang for the buck but it is high carbon. I dont go looking for huge upgrades in nonSS's since they aernt needed (altough a-1 is really nice). 440c was not a great steel imo and needed usurped. Loveless was suing 154 cm when 440c was a standard and to much better effect. S30V has proven itslef to me to be better than 154cm and i hope 20cv can do the same. The reason you aernt watching zdp-189 is because its so hard to get. It has already produced affordable knives with high hardness unheard of in a production knife. I'd say thats a pretty serious upgrade from 440c or 420HC. Also in knives like Ricks XM-18 the steel must be many things, sacrafice in non critical areas for a knife that will stand up to heavy abuse and not rust in any reasonable condtion while holding a razor edge is a huge boon. I dont think anyone argues that stainless has replaced high carbon, but in aplications that need it I think of the 440 series as a relic. I dont think any sebenza owner is wishing that they had a 420HC blade instead of S30V or BG-42.
 
BigJimSlade said:
Standard finish is dictated by what looks good. S30V doent polish up as nice imo but i have polished it and it polishes just like any other steel. The grit in the compounds cuts and therefore polishes. It may take a little time but believe me there are steels with much much worse grindability than S30V, try CPM-M4 for example,a non stainless. Also I agree that a steel like 01 gives alot of bang for the buck but it is high carbon. I dont go looking for huge upgrades in nonSS's since they aernt needed (altough a-1 is really nice). 440c was not a great steel imo and needed usurped. Loveless was suing 154 cm when 440c was a standard and to much better effect. S30V has proven itslef to me to be better than 154cm and i hope 20cv can do the same. The reason you aernt watching zdp-189 is because its so hard to get. It has already produced affordable knives with high harness unheard of in a production knife. I'd say thats a pretty serious upgrade from 440c or 420HC. Also in knives like Ricks XM-18 the steel must be many things, sacrafice in non critical areas for a knife that will stand up to heavy abuse and not rust in any reasonable condtion while holding a razor edge is a huge boon. I dont think anyone argues that stainless has replaced high carbon, but in aplications that need it I think of the 440 series as a relic. I dont think any sebenza owner is wishing that they had a 420HC blade instead of S30V or BG-42.
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Well, all this may be true.
You're clearly very knowledgable, and I respect what you have to say.

Still:
I trust my good 440C blades, especially customs. But quality production knives too.
I trusted good 440C in the mid 1970s, and I trust it today.
And I love the way it cuts and the way it sharpens up.
And I never read threads about it chipping, or fracturing, or ...

Look - I (like many of us here on BF) have a lot of different knives in many different steels, stainless, tool, carbon...collected and used, often hard.

And IMO good 440C is overall a really, really good stainless steel.
For actually using.
 
I wont argue that 440c makes a usuable knife, but anything with proper edge geometry should be well within reason to sharpen so I dont use that as a guage to buy a steel or not.

Also only S30V has reports of chipping as far as I know and as I have said there are tens of thousands of knives in S30V functioning with no problems while I have only seen a dozen or so chipping claims. Within production knives that is, I have never heard of a custom S30V knife chipping out. I would guess what chipping happened was due to HT issues that have been worked out since and fall within the area of produciton problems that happen to every facet of production knives. Every once in a while you get lock issues, or blade aligment problems. You send it back and they warranty it. No one wants to have to use there warranty but on production knives it happens. Again I have never seen any S30V chipping problems except pics ina post.

Remove S30V and I see little to critisise in the remaining steels over 440c. They hold steeper angles and need to be sharpened less. All in all I wil simply take the better preforming steel. After making blades in 440c and then other SS's I simply see no reason to go backwards. If you use a knife with Aus-8 why buy the same knife in Aus-6. The preformance gap may not be the difference in a dull knife and a sharp one, but clearly the 8 is better. If a friend asked for a knife in 440c I would suggest Ats-34 as a simmilar priced steel with better preformance. Ats-34 for a fixed blade is like $6.00, I see little reason to go cheaper than that if you will get better preformance out of ats-34.

I would never suggest that a 440c knife should be discarded or that the difference will "Blow your mind" so go buy a new knife in a new steel. I'm not into that sort of sales tactic. But if you are making or buying a new knife I do think you can do better than 440c in this day and age. Even if you like the old school I think a BG-42 buck 110 would put a smile on anyones face and with HT by Pual Boss you really cant be concerened with issues related to HT.
 
After trying all the Stainless steels on the market except 20CV, and some obscure ones, and quite a few carbon steels I'd like to see carbon alloy steels in high tech folders. With the treatments now available even the afraid of rust types can rest happy.

Give me Super Blue, F2/F8, Vascowear ( or whatever they call it now), 9CV, or the shock steels where called for. I'd call for M4, and some others that I haven't tried yet. M2 is still viable, as are lots of others. I'd even try T1, and other monster steels in folders if possible.

Time, effort and price are the real drawbacks, not the steel themselves. Forget that, I want performance, and rust holds no fear for me. I can take care of my knives. Joe
 
S30v is hard to finish well. That's why some manufacturers end up bead-blasting it and 'showcasing' its' lack of rust resistance compared to alloys like ATS-34 or 154cm.

In my opinion as an absolute knife-noob, ATS-34 is a pretty good steel, as are all others, depending what you want to use them for.
 
I don't know about bias, but I know why I don't like ATS-34. I've owned a few from different manufactures (Koncept, Benchmade, and maybe another) and each was a disappointment. When I tried to sharpen them, they had a "gummy" feeling (for lack of a better adjective) and I never got a satisfactory edge, regardless of the sharpening tool. I suspect that was a result of the blades not being hard enough, but since I don't know, I've avoided ATS-34 since then.
 
HoB said:
Guess I am a bit late to this party.

No D2 is not tough and even with the appropriate or best heat treat it still isn't. But then again, no stainless (with the exception of maybe H1, which I don't know enough about these PH steels are very diffent) is. All the really tough steels are non-stainless.
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This, I think, is the crux of the issue. There's context around this discussion of D-2 and toughness. Many times, especially with people who are less experienced with knives and steels, most exposure has been to stainless steels. D-2 can be tougher than ATS-34 at what most people would recognize as "high-end folder" type hardness. In short, compared to other steels that serve this purpose, D-2 is tough.

D-2 is not tough when taken out of that context, and put into the broader context of tough working steels for knives generally. Not tough compared to A-2, worse compared to L-6, worse still compared to S-7.


That's why you'll hear people on folder forums -- e.g., benchmade forum -- talking about how tough D-2 is, but hear people on an outdoors forum (i.e., people used to 5160, L-6, etc) talking about how D-2 is not tough. Perhaps I'm re-motivated to fix up the steel FAQ. Someone pointed out a couple of years ago that I mix my contexts up in the FAQ -- that is, I talk about toughness when it comes to stainless steels, relative to each other. And I talk about non-stainless relative to each other as well. So, to someone who hasn't figured out I've switched frames, they could think that a particular stainless is tougher than a particular tool steel, when is fact the reverse is true, it's just that I'm measuring each against different standards without discussing what those standards are.
 
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