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Carbon or Stainless?

A

Aerose91

Joined
Feb 11, 2014
Messages
69
What are some of the pluses/minuses of carbon steel vs stainless steel. Things like corrosion and rust resistence, edge retention, longevity, etc...
 
Many threads already on this.

Nowadays stainless offer good retention and carbon offers decent corrosion resistance, soon they might meet in the middle.

Me personally, prefer high carbon blades, my kitchen knives are nearly all high carbon.
My pocket knives are stainless. If chris reeve offered carbon blade that'd be my first choice.
 
Carbon-Steel = better for longer, tough use blades!

Stainless = better for smaller, EDC blades!

D2 and similar = better all around!

For details use some Search-Fu! :p
 
Aerose91 said:
What are some of the pluses/minuses of carbon steel vs stainless steel. Things like corrosion and rust resistence, edge retention, longevity, etc...
Click to expand...

There are no general statements that can be made about carbon vs stainless...not even about rust resistance anymore! Read, read, read about specific steels.
 
The lines are blurred now days, stainless has gotten better and there are a lot of different steels available. It's better to be asking about specifics more than anything. Take 3 of the blade steels that's right next to me CPM S110V, Aus-8, Victorinox Inox blade steel. All 3 are stainless steel but their drastically difference in performance.

Plus there are a million threads on this already, so use the search and come back with a more specific question. This one is quite broad and most statements we make will be "vaguely" close to right at best if we tried to answer.
 
Not mentioned so much yet, but carbon steel can be tougher than stainless.

There is always a tradeoff between hardness and toughness. Different steels move the tradeoff point up and down the scale, and amount of corrosion resistance is one factor that affects the tradeoff.
 
Depends what the intended use is...
You could read for hours the old posts on this subject....
 
carbon steel will become unusable and rust away to nothing within moments of touching salt water or other liquids.

and stainless steel will chip and crack if you cut anything harder than paper.
 
Stainless are for girl, real man use carbon J/K :D


For me well heat treated carbon steel will perform better than well done stainless, If I have the choice I would pick carbon/tool steel over stainless anytime.

For folder stainless would be a good choice since you would occasionally need to disassembly to clean if the blade were carbon.
 
Stainless is always gonna be much better choice, unless you are hung up on tradition and such gobbledygook...
 
rajincagin said:
Stainless is always gonna be much better choice, unless you are hung up on tradition and such gobbledygook...
Click to expand...

that's a very blanket statement on a very broad subject.

stainless will always be the best at what?

there's a very real reason certain people still use carbon steels for specific tasks.
 
Carbon steel is for men, stainless for ladies, ;)

Stainless holds an edge slightly longer, but is more difficult to sharpen. It won't rust as easily, it's inert, lifeless, scentless, characterless and is prone to chipping / breaking if used hard.
 
Anarkistic said:
Carbon steel is for men, stainless for ladies, ;)

Stainless holds an edge slightly longer, but is more difficult to sharpen. It won't rust as easily, it's inert, lifeless, scentless, characterless and is prone to chipping / breaking if used hard.
Click to expand...

Which stainless though I can tell you my CPM S110V spyderco has better wear resistance than my carbon steel Opinel, but my Opinel has better wear resistance than the 440a in my Rough Riders and the stainless in my SAK's. And yes I took it to the extreme with the S110V, but it's what I own, I don't own a middle ground between these steels really.

So were back to the whole, general statements suck for this again. Only thing I can say for a general statement is if you hate rust or patina go with stainless but if you like a patina on a blade and like how it gives it "life" go carbon. Beyond that if you want a certain characteristic in a blade chances are you can find it in either carbon or stainless.
 
The vast array of steels with differing characteristics make just about any general statement pretty useless. Toughness, hardness, wear resistance and corrosion resistance vary so widely that it makes much more sense to look at the characteristics of the specific steels you're interested in.
 
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