Blade Coatings: yes or no?

I'm not a fan of any coating on a blade. I don't care what the coating is it doesn't hold up. If you use the knife it looks like crap in no time. I have quite a few coated blades bought over the years. I wouldn't buy one now.


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I quite like the look of a knife with its coated having been mostly offed from daily use. Gives the blade a certain amount of character.
 
just to add, DLC does not add to corrosion resistance IME.

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That SERE pictured earlier was sweet!!Only full coatings Ive owned are on Cold Steels and ESEEs and theyre decent... but my favorite is Stone/Blackwashed....

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No. I have no interest in blade coatings at all. It is not a total deal breaker on a knife I'm interested in, but I would definitely prefer the knife without any coating at all regardless of brand. I like Becker knives and if it were available, I'd never get one with the black coating. If I am luke warm in terms of getting a knife and it's coated, generally that means I won't buy it.
 
i prefer stonewash or acid stonewash
more durable
doesnt show imperfections as much
 
Unless they've changed the process, ion bond dlc has a layer of chrome underneath the black. I'd imagine that helps with corrosion a bit. I wouldn't expect it to be rust proof though. That pic above doesn't appear to show any corrosion, it just shows some coloration likely from oil or something on the blade. Also most things that look like scratches on dlc are simply metal deposits from other materials and can be cleaned off with wd40 and some scrubbing.
 
bodog said:
What I'm trying to figure out is how someone with an ACTUAL DLC coated blade can manage to scratch it.
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Well, you've done it:

bodog said:
Hell, cutting and batoning into concrete barely left a couple of scratches and that's literally banging it directly into a bunch of compressed rocks.
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bodog said:
But don't go acting like cutting marshmallows will scratch real DLC.
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I'm not sure he ever said that.......



The best DLC I have owned has been from Spartan. Stuff is damn tough.
 
valknut said:
Gonna have to disagree with you on this
https://youtu.be/s6cKjbDToXU
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ill take science over youtube

Although the DLC coatings resisted well to the corrosive action of the aggressive media, nucleation and growth of homogenous and micro-sized pinholes uniformly distributed on DLC coatings were observed as a result of the corrosion processes.
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http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10853-010-4602-5

and

http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/46237.pdf
 
Normally no coatings for me. Give me a nice stonewashed blade any day.

Right now I have two knives that are coated. A Ka-Bar Dozier with a zombie green handle and a Benchmade 551 in D2 steel. I will strip the Dozier when the weather warms up and the jury is still out if I even like the D2 steel blade of the 551.
 
furfmonkey said:
ill take science over youtube



http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10853-010-4602-5

and

http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/46237.pdf
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Thanks for posting that article. In this instance YouTube and Science agree that DLC does protect from corrosion! Makes sense when you think about it. A little broader quote from what your scientific article says so everyone doesn't have to sort through it...

"DLC coatings effectively protected the substrate after 48 h in a salt fog chamber and after the first Kesternich cycle. For comparison, under the same conditions, titanium nitride (TiN) coatings did not protect the substrate even for 2 h of saline exposure and even for the first Kesternich cycle. Although the DLC coatings resisted well to the corrosive action of the aggressive media, nucleation and growth of homogenous and micro-sized pinholes uniformly distributed on DLC coatings were observed as a result of the corrosion processes. The observed results suggest that the development of techniques which would reduce the porosity of the DLC films could promote further improvement on their corrosion protection ability."
 
Biginboca said:
Thanks for posting that article. In this instance YouTube and Science agree that DLC does protect from corrosion! Makes sense when you think about it. A little broader quote from what your scientific article says so everyone doesn't have to sort through it...

"DLC coatings effectively protected the substrate after 48 h in a salt fog chamber and after the first Kesternich cycle. For comparison, under the same conditions, titanium nitride (TiN) coatings did not protect the substrate even for 2 h of saline exposure and even for the first Kesternich cycle. Although the DLC coatings resisted well to the corrosive action of the aggressive media, nucleation and growth of homogenous and micro-sized pinholes uniformly distributed on DLC coatings were observed as a result of the corrosion processes. The observed results suggest that the development of techniques which would reduce the porosity of the DLC films could promote further improvement on their corrosion protection ability."
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Now that that's pretty firmly settled, what about adhesion and scratch resistance

Edit: somewhat of a rhetorical question. Literally every study out there says proper DLC coated steel outperforms non-coated steels. There's a study that says that soft steel is too weak to handle it as it dents and causes fracturing of the coating but really everything else says that DLC coated steel radically outperforms non-coated steels. It can be argued forever. A lot of people are equating the black paint benchmade uses or the black TiN that other manufacturers use to DLC or they're saying they use their knives in such a way as to cause permanent indentation in the primary bevels to saying DLC is bad. They absolutely wrong. Any kind of Google search will return with as many studies as needed to very it.

Now if someone simply said "I only like raw knives and having top performance doesn't matter" then I get it and that, to me, seems like a perfectly reasonable answer. I don't like coatings that much because I like to sometimes modify my blades in one way or another. DLC makes that really difficult. But people should not and cannot say that blades properly coated with DLC underperform knives without it and they cannot say that whatever rough work they do that would damage DLC would NOT damage an uncoated blade

If they do then they're either lying or letting some subjective factor influence their decision or maybe even they're saying that the essentially black paint some manufacturers use is the same as DLC and they're too ignorant to know the difference.

There are far too many studies saying DLC coated steel radically outperforms uncoated steels in cutting jobs to ignore. One only has to look for themselves.
 
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Personally I like DLC and similar, but some of the thicker coated blades I am not into anymore as much. I like to strip coatings on some and wear the coating off the old fashioned way. Usually I have been kind of stone washing the blades so they still don't show wear much. The DLC would not stop me from buying a sweet ZT like a 804CF which is the only one I want right now. Stripping is fun.







 
sabre cat said:
Normally no coatings for me. Give me a nice stonewashed blade any day.

Right now I have two knives that are coated. A Ka-Bar Dozier with a zombie green handle and a Benchmade 551 in D2 steel. I will strip the Dozier when the weather warms up and the jury is still out if I even like the D2 steel blade of the 551.
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I've always wondered how "protective" a stonewash finish is.
Science, YouTube, Facebook their all right it's in the internet :)
 
valknut said:
I've always wondered how "protective" a stonewash finish is.
Science, YouTube, Facebook their all right it's in the internet :)
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I definitely expect to take care of the blade more if there's no coating on a 1095 or SR-101 blade, but as far as scratching it up, they hide scratches better. We'll see how the sanded finishes hold up to rust. Steels like INFI, it always seemed just a cost savings step for a rough blade under the paint. I was surprised how polished and worked the grind on the Mil Regulators are though. The SYCKO 511 has machined bevels that are pretty sweet looking, and the KABAR Beckers machined bevels look great underneath too. KABAR coatings are TOUGH. Roughest grinds I have seen so far were on a SYKCO Chophouse.
 
There is something really beautiful about a nice polished blade though. I have a Talwar with the polished blade and it looks great compared to the new black bladed Talwar I have. Less tactical though, hahah. I guess it is just on a case by case basis for me. I wanted a PM2 with the black blade. Matte black is pretty sweet, and reminds me of parkerization like the Mineral Mountains, Hollow Ground Regulators, and AR-15's.
 
crufflers said:
There is something really beautiful about a nice polished blade though. I have a Talwar with the polished blade and it looks great compared to the new black bladed Talwar I have. Less tactical though, hahah. I guess it is just on a case by case basis for me. I wanted a PM2 with the black blade. Matte black is pretty sweet, and reminds me of parkerization like the Mineral Mountains, Hollow Ground Regulators, and AR-15's.
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I really liked a satin finish blade, especially when the flats are a different finish than the bevel. And Parkerized blades look really sweet too. I hate mirror polishes though
 
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