Carbon Steel on a Crab Boat?!

stingray4540

stingray4540

Joined
Mar 26, 2007
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If my eyes don't deceive me, I believe I saw a carbon steel Mora Clipper on one of the ships on the show "Deadliest Catch." It was unsheathed laying on the table in front of one of the hydraulic operators.

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Now, you know that a good, sharp, reliable knife is VERY important, on a boat, especially a crab boat. So, it's interesting to see a carbon steel knife in an environment, that many would want you to think, would turn a carbon knife into a pile of rust dust.

If I'm right, it just goes to show how irrelevant the argument for ss, when working around water, is.

Of course there are those who just don't want to take the time to take care of there knives, and that's understandable, but to say that you must have stainless steel because it will be used around water is BS.

Obviously I'm a big fan of Carbon, and it's the only steel I will use, and 98% of my cutting is done around water, primarily 'cause I fish a lot. I've even taken carbon out to sea, and it came back nearly unaffected, besides some nice patina, in fact the leather sheath was worse off than the knife. It's also interesting to note that my SS Leatherman has more rust on it than my CS knives. I think it's time for SS proponents to admit that there need for SS is do to one of two reasons:
A) They like there knives to look shiny and new all the time or, B) They just don't want to spend any extra time taking proper care of there cutting implements.



Just an observation I thought I'd share...

Any thoughts???

P.S. Lets try and keep this civilized.
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I went fishing for a week with a near mirror finish carbon blade. Apart from patina, it had no markings. I think the carbon rusting argument is void. As long as you don't have your carbon knives bead blasted, there shouldn't be a problem.
 
Sorry, but my carbon blades rust pretty thoroughly when I'm on the boats and I'm usually in freshwater. They do require attention, such as constantly coating with oil after use.

If the knife isn't used, then yes it stays in nice shape. Start cutting on wet rope and you get quite a bit of surface rust that will start forming within 30 min under high temperature. A patina helps quite a bit, as does a shiny finish. However they don't compare in corrosion resistance to stainless. Of course a little bit of surface rough rarely really harms a knife.

All that said, I do prefer carbon knives for the edge they take and my main boat knife right now is an O1 breeden knife. I keep a patina on it and an oil rag in my pack to give it a quick wipe between uses.
 
I live in a coastal city.. I kayak in and around local bays hike in coastal marshes and fish in and generally play in and around salt water, I also frequently drive up to the moutains and play and fish and kayak in freshwater lakes and streams as well..for about the past year anbd a half the majority of my edc blades are made of carbon steel.. and have suffered no ill effects.. I keep a bandana in my pocket if the blade gets wet while working, I wipe it down..Like I'd do with any knife...I think even if you dropped a carbon steel knife into the ocean...and left it there..it would still be there long after you and I have gone... There still finding weapons and tools of primitive sea fareres, that where entirely comprised of carbon steel.. Are they usable probably not... but after 600 years a sog seal-pup wouldn't be either... JMO
 
i personally take stainless out on the water with me when i go (fairly seldom) because i don't want to have to think about my knife. also, stainless is the only steel that an SAK comes in, and i like to have a couple of extra tools when i'm in the water.

for me, perhaps due to lack of experience, it seems as though everything moves a little faster on the water, and i never have alot of time to think about taking care of my tools and gear...because of this i like to use foolproof gear.

on land, its a different story. i love carbon steel because of the nostalgia from the patina and because it performs better for me than the stainless i have used (still a high-tech steel virgin though...)

jackknife has told stories before of his family's fishing boat in maryland with a bucket of carbon steel old hickories i believe...never anything on them but a deep black patina.
 
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I saw the show and saw the Mora but thought it must be a Stainless version. How do you know it was carbon by the handle color? Not an expert on Moras just asking
 
Chiller2 said:
I saw the show and saw the Mora but thought it must be a Stainless version. How do you know it was carbon by the handle color? Not an expert on Moras just asking
Click to expand...


Ya, by handle color. The red ones are carbon, and the blue ones are Stainless.
 
siguy said:
for me, perhaps due to lack of experience, it seems as though everything moves a little faster on the water, and i never have alot of time to think about taking care of my tools and gear...because of this i like to use foolproof gear.
Click to expand...

Which is a perfectly valid argument for your own preference.

What I just don't like, is people continually leading people to believe that carbon knives will rust the minute they touch water and be unserviceable. And that they must have Stainless because the loss in performance is worth the gain in less rust. Or when you get someone who knows nothing about steel and knives that makes a comment like, "If you want a really sharp knife, you need to get some good surgical stainless steel...":barf:
 
Somehow the Vikings managed to cross the North Atlantic in open boats to Nova Scotia and keep thier swords, axes, and knives from rusting away by the time they got there. As did the Spanish explorers of the south west, as well as Captian John Smith of Jamestown in 1608.

Carbon steel will survive on a boat quite well. Just wipe it down every morning, and it will be fine.
 
I grew up on the shores of the Mediterranean and frequently went fishing with my father for moray eels and octopus. We used large box traps made locally from wild reeds and a mix of bread, fish guts, assortment of worms we found in sea weed and bad cheese as bait.

We had Opinels and, if I had to guess, I'd say most of the other fishermen had the same thing
 
Pitting is the evil genie for carbon steel, but I have carbon steel and if a bit of surface rust appears, I take care of it ASAP. Otherwise, they require a bit of maintenance. Personally, I use Mora knives with 12c27 or 12c27mod stainless because I prefer the steel and lack of required maintenance aside from occassional sharpening.
 
I carried mora's for a while when I commercial fished out of Gloucester and Rockport, Massachusetts. I liked them particularly because the sheath could clip to an elastic belt made from grundens suspenders, stayed on when I drew the knife and was comfortable to use with stiff rubber gloves. You see a lot of stainless moras on commercial fishing boats around there as well as vic paring knives (vickies) and dexter russel high carbon boning knives.

I carried a stainless one for a while because my brother replaced it with a carbon one and gave it to me, and I carried his carbon one as well.

Being a commercial fisherman and a knife guy I noticed a lot of what was being used and a lot of it is inexpensive (not cheap) gear. Moras make good rope knives, sheath knives, "rippers" (thats what we called 5" Dexter boning knives), deck knives etc, and if they are lost i.e. dropped overboard, washed off of a gunwale or dragged off a gillnet table they are easily replaced for short money.

I've been on commercial and charter fishing boats where there were mora's zip tied to every fixed piece of hardware on the boat (lobster tray, lobster tank, upright stanchions, ladder etc.)

I preferred the carbon steel one because it held an edge longer between touch-ups (I carried a gerber diamond sharpening rod with me). The sheaths for them were easily clipped to a belt, waistband of a pair of sweats or shorts (lots of guys wear sweatpants under oilskins for comfort and ease of movement) they are robust enough to handle 99 percent of on-board cutting chores from bait to rope, twine to rubber "cookies" (chafing gear for otter trawl nets). I've pried with mine, used it as a screwdriver, and if i broke it or lost it it wouldnt bust the bank to replace.

I found the victorinox paring knives too small to use with gloves on and rippers didnt have a sheath so the knife would stay on the lobster tray while I ran the traps, 30 feet away from where I would most likely need it, and the mora sheath stayed put even when snagged on stacks of traps or rope, the knife drew fast and easily and i was able to get a comfortable grip on it in gloves without having to shift the handle in my hands.

My red handled mora rusted badly when i didn't take care of it but some emery paper to take off the surface rust and wd-40 to break up the more difficult stuff made it useable in a matter of minutes.

I noticed the rust was formed most of the time by leaving it in the sheath when the sheath and knife were wet. Other than that they are very inexpensive, very serviceable fixed blade knives for the commercial or recreational fisherman.

pete
 
“I think it's time for SS proponents to admit that there need for SS is do to one of two reasons:
A) They like there knives to look shiny and new all the time or, B) They just don't want to spend any extra time taking proper care of there cutting implements.”

...and I think it is time we did something about those assumptions.

1] True stainless steel is not suitable for making knives. I know people refer to 'stainless' as a quick heuristic when speaking of knives that are less liable to corrosion, but I think it's worth mentioning that it is only 'a gist', and a fairly arbitrary point. True, over time a working consensus has been arrived at, but it could have been set a little higher or lower and there wouldn't have been much bitching.

2] Corrosion is a performance characteristic. There's no getting out of that regardless of how much one squirms. As a performance characteristic it is undesirable. Note: Trying to dismiss this because it is one aspect in a range of aspects that effect performance does not negate the truth of it. Too many discussions get lost under that quite deliberate obfuscation. An example of which could be to suddenly pile on top what big carbon choppers can do or something. But the tenacious reader will be able to dig under that detritus to maintain a firm grasp of the fact that corrosion effects performance.

3] Having established [2] we can now consider to what degree performance is effected. Some will appeal to grampa and say not very much, some will base their view on pottering around the lawn of a house they've lived in since birth, and they have the evidence of their own eyes. A different person might consider it an overwhelming factor. Hey, but at least we are getting somewhere. At least there is a tacit recognition that corrosion is undesirable even if you think it's only a teensy bit.

4] Now we can move on properly. So, corrosion is a bad thing, right. So, what would make anyone select a knife that was disposed to it. Here we can legitimately wind in other performance factors: eg. If you stick X amount of chrome in the mix it won't cut as good...blah blah. By having X amount of X in the composition it makes it liable to chipping...blah blah. Essentially, what we ought to be doing is simply identifying that you can't have it all ways round and compromises have to be made. You have to prioritize. But what if you didn't. What if an extremely corrosion resistant blade material was manufactured that that performed in every way indistinguishably from the beloved carbons save for that it didn't rust. Would anyone want it? Note: I'm not saying better than, I'm saying indistinguishably from what you've got already, save for the corrosion aspect.

5] I believe there are many that wouldn't go for the hypothetical corrosion resisting material in [4]. I believe for those people the answer is pretty clear, their knife performance is playing second fiddle to something else. I didn't even attempt to make the case that many modern corrosion resistant steels can have vastly superior performance characteristics. My thought experiment pretty much effectively offering them up what they had already but with a sprinkling of magickal ren-wax, that never need re-doing, and it would keep their gear pristine.

6] I believe the reason for that lies in some weird emotional thing that treats a knife quite differently from other tools. It lays totally outside the scope of performance or usefulness and is couched firmly in the imagination of the owner. I think of it like a having one's name tag sewn in the collar. They want their knives to corrode simply because the pattern makes it unique to them. You even see people that can't handle the newness of a knife, they have to raid the larder or the cold-blu, anything, anything at all that will in some way make it unique and special to them. You even get folks that insist a knife has 'come alive' or 'lives' because of that unique pattern of rot, and elevate it to deity status.

7] I believe there are a great reasons why some highly corrosion resistant steels are unsuitable for tool X, at time X, at place X. The simple reason being that at the current time the priories one has can demand that. But it must be remembered that it is only the current state of play at this time, with what we have available. It has not always been that way nor will it be the same as this for ever. Although the way I see it so many of the anti-corrosion people clinging to their argument as if we are in some sort of stasis, and corrosion resistance could never and will never be a desirable property. And that is plain weird to me. Many of us can pick a path through quite happily even now, and tomorrow and tomorrow at it's petty pace only promises more paths. Those with the assumptions about stainless are going to be clinging out in the cold. We should be attempting to take forward as many desirable performance characteristics as possible, including corrosion resistance, and hopefully steels will emerge where the compromises are even fewer. One thing is for sure , the simplistic carbon vs stainless debate is too blunt at tool to help us achieve that.
 
Baldtaco II: Wow, what a thought(s).
Maybe I didn't really articulate my point though. I'm not saying that stainless doesn't have it's place, or that no one should never use stainless. I was merely ranting about how some stainless enthusiasts would like you to believe that plain carbon will magically turn into a pile of dust as soon as it touches water. And that just doesn't happen, and far from it, that's why I brought up the fact of plain carbon being perfectly functional even in a salt water environment.

I do have a soft spot for carbon, for several reasons, some of which may not be logical. But, I'm not a stainless basher, and if that is your steel of choice then I'm not going to argue. Like you said, there are compromises no matter what steel you choose, and I'd rather see those pro's and con's being discussed when talking about a steel, then for one side to say that carbon will disintegrate at the site of water, or the other side to say that stainless has no soul, etc. Just the Facts Jack!
 
In my opinion the number one knife you are going to find on New England commercial fishing boats is the 5 inch Dexter Russell high carbon wide stiff boning knife, #1375 or "ripper". Why?

They take a better (sharper) edge than stainless knives of equal (and sometimes greater) value, hold it longer, and are easier to sharpen in the field and to maintain with a steel. They are primarily used to "rip"- gut- fish on gillnetters and draggers. The longer ones are used on deep sea party or charter boats for the same reasons when large volumes of fish need to be filletted in a short time period.

Simply put, carbon steel knives, in my opinion, are better suited in that capacity than similarly priced stainless knives. Hence the mora and dexter-russell's use on commercial fishing boats.

Most commercial fisherman are not knife guys and look at price and ease of use above other factors. There is a reason that these knives have been in use for decades in the new england fishery.

Our rippers on the party boat would rinsed with fresh water at the end of the day and put in a tupperware tote in an out of the way place, or left in our boots until the next day. If we went a few days and some rust built up on them, a brillo pad or emory cloth would be used to clean the surface rust off. Maybe we'd use some WD-40. For the most part, they would be used daily for a summer then stowed till the next summer.

My carbon mora experienced even less manitenance and would rust up pretty good from NON-USE and improper storage. When it was used daily, it took an irridescent then a dark grey patina and experienced no severe corrosion.

This probably isnt the thread to do the carbon v. stainless discussion. Carbon knives, including the moras, are standard kit on a lot of sea-going commercial fishing boats on the east and most likely the west coasts.

Pete
 
I own a collection of knives that was started many decades ago. In the collection, are knives dating back to the very early part of American history ( Revolutionary War to Civil War period). The fact that these knives are still around (they were used, too) with forged carbon steel blades and wood handles testify to their durability and efficiency. There are scores of more recent carbon steel blades in the collection also. Too, my stainless knife collection is considered large and impressive. I have early stainless blades that were considered "the new kid on the block", and the most sophisticated stainless recipes to come out of the lab. Some of these stainless steels I worked with in the aircraft industry before they were widely available for knifemakers.

In all fairness (unless comparing a Mora against a Mora), it is nearly impossible to generally compare all carbon blades against all stainless blades with regards to their performance and maintenance. I have many stainless blades (same dimensions and geometry) that turn a carbon Mora into a sad story when considering edge-holding and maintenance (yep, I own stacks of Mora's too). And, I might add, some of my inexpensive carbon Mora's will put a few of my production stainless knives to shame when all is considered. Just simply too many things to consider when comparing carbon and stainless blades without the specifics.

I agree, I think we are sometimes overly concerned with carbon steel blades and rust. Some carbon blades will rust much faster than other carbon blades (compare W-2 and A-2, for example). Nope, I wouldn't be on an ocean fishing boat with a blade made from a file or, some unknown "surgical stainless" variety...if I had a choice in the matter. :)
 
is it me or where else can you go and view people arguing over knives?....i love this forum, now im gonna go and get one of those moras

thanks
 
FWIW my PIGT (Pre-Internet Go To) fishing knife was a carbon steel Schrade Sharpfinger.
I'd fish on the beach and boat.
The knife cut bait, cleaned fish, trimmed lines and never suffered for it.
The only care it got was a wipe on a dry rag or pants leg before it was resheathed.
When I got home and rinsed then WD40'd the rods and reels I did the knife too.
The only time it ever turned a little orange was one hot, hot sunny day with too much beer. I neglected my chores and did them the next day.
That tiny bit of orange came off with WD40 and a coarse rag.

That knife did look like an old hammer, but it worked fine :D
 
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