Cru Forge V hamon?

Don Hanson III said:
Manganese, chromium and vanadium in excess all make for deep hardening.
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My taste runs to deep-hardening steels with both toughness and high wear-resistance, so naturally the moderate amounts of chromium and vanadium in Cru-Forge are what attract me to it.

I've worked a bit with vanadium-bearing, high-wear-resistance steels like CPM-3V and D2 and I feel the finish you get before HT is pretty much what you're stuck with, unless you like bead-blasting and/or coatings. I've also found that finishing before HT and using the cleanest process possible avoids much of the mind-numbing horrors of hand-sanding most any steel. 3V can be brought to a very nice satin polish that way; D2 not so much because it has that nasty orange-peel look anyway, so why bother? It remains to be seen if CPM-D2 finishes up nicely, I haven't had any HT'ed yet... but it looks very nice pre-HT and reports from other makers are encouraging.

Mind you, I "cheat" and let Peters' do my HT for me in their vacuum furnaces, because they come back very clean with little hand-sanding needed :D I just got a batch of O1 blades back from them and after a couple light passes on a 400x belt to wipe off the oxide colors from tempering, they're just as clean and pretty as when I sent them in, ready for high-grit hand-polishing.

So anyway... I'm curious if Cru-Forge would be a good candidate for anti-scale compounds that claim to prevent scale and decarb, when HT'ed in a typical small-shop forge or kiln. On paper it seems like it would be.

By the way, I'm serious about having someone forging some Cru-Forge down to thinner stock. I imagine that would be a lot of work but maybe we could work out some kind of trade? I like big choppers and bowies as much as the next guy but being a stock-removal maker, it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to convert that much steel into worthless dust :(
 
Heat treated in a kiln with good oil cru-forge comes out with basically no scale. The trick that Dan showed me was to put a small bit of charcoal in the furnace on a scrap of foil to burn up and pull out the oxygen. Don't know how well it fares without it, but I can say there's basically no scale to speak of with it.
 
Don Hanson III said:
Not really off topic. Manganese is the primary hamon killer, but if the carbon is low enough, like 1050-1060 (even though it's high Mn) you can get a very active hamon. Manganese, chromium and vanadium in excess all make for deep hardening.

I prefer to go the other direction, high carbon, but with low manganese, shallow hardening. W2, 1086M, W1 and 1095. W2 being my favorite by far. High performance with crazy active hamon. :)
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I agree, I use 1095 and w-2 when I want a hamon. Those railroad clips are about 0.80 mn.
 
I've found that if you can slog your way past 400 grit it's not too much of a bother to go beyond it - but, JEEEZZUZZZZ will it hang on to a 220 grit scratch! Yikes!

I've used PBC anti-scale powder on a few of my blades and it works well.

The only instances where the steel didn't manage to perform properly where when I didn't follow proper heat treating procedures (intentionally), and even then the results weren't catastrophic like they would be with any of the simple carbon steels.

None of the other forging steels I've used offered the same combination of toughness and edge retention.

I still rely on 1095 or W2 when I want hamon.
 
AcridSaint said:
Sorry, thought I read 95 on the previous page.
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No biggie, I may have accidentally typed that..Those railroad anchors are "fairly" consistant from what I have seen..There is only one or two companys in the US that make them. According to friends and family that work for the railroad they have a set of perameters that they must be manufactured in or they wont accept them. Which makes sense..
 
Does anyone happen to have the Crucible datasheet for Cru Forge? It's disappeared off their web page :(
 
Thanks Matthew!

One surprising thing: Crucible never indicates the toughness? On all their other datasheets, they list toughness per quench temperature, and toughness with respect to their other products?
 
yeah, Lazlo... I think the bottom fell out of Crucible just around the same time that CruForgeV was released, which also happened to be the same roll-out for CPMS35vn, so needless to say an inexpensive boutique steel made in a single batch took the back seat to stainless and production-based stock. It's really too bad, as it's the first dramatic improvement in forging steels that can actually be used by someone with just a bit of experience and create a blade with significantly improved performance. So far the only gripe I've heard about it is from bladesmiths, and that's because the steel doesn't finish anywhere near as easy as steels with nowhere near as much abrasion resistance. Yep, folks... better performance means more work. I kind of thought the whole reason that someone would buy a custom knife was because they were expecting better performance - but what the hell do I know, right? :D

I don't know if you've seen this or not, but Dan Farr did a quick write-up on the steel here.
 
Thanks for bringing this up guys. I've been playing with Cru-Forge V for about a year now and really like it. I also, have had very little luck bringing up a nice hamon-line. And, thank you for your points on this Matthew - it is indeed worth a little more elbow-grease here. And thanks for the info. I have been looking for that write-up by Dan Farr for a while.
-M
 
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