Edge retention must be considered in its virgin state or you cannot have consistent or accurate data.
This is a useless defination. Here is the only one that makes sense :
Edge retention : a measure of how long a knife retains a productive sharpness during working conditions.
Thus for a salt water fillet knife, the edge retention is highly critical on corrosion resistance.
A parang is a large chopping knife, one of many, bolos, goloks, khukuris. The edge retention of them would all be poor in high carbide steels with exceptional wear resistance because the steels would all micro-chip.
Note even if you want to ignore these complications, guys like Johnston have shown for years that wear resistance is not the only factor, and not even the critical one even if you ignore corrosion resistance and toughness.
Johnson showed this on rec.knives by taking steels like ATS-34 and noting that it had a poor ability to hold a very high sharpness at a low angle. The problem was that all these large carbides which give it good wear resistance actually tear out of the edge and it goes blunt faster.
Landes showed this recently including micro-graphs on steels and detailed measurement showing how steels like S90 had poor ability in this regard than steels like 13C26 even though S90V had way more wear resistance. I wrote up some notes on this awhile ago that you can read over in the article I wrote on edge stability.
How can you possibly know that?
Checked against ASM texts. I referenced a bunch of them on the website. His values are also WAY too high to be v-notch. Larrin corrected me on this months ago, which lead me to investigate it further and determine he was right, the data is mangled.
[core]
Please describe the basis for this claim.
I am pretty sure from memory, Bryson even notes this earlier in his book in the section on W1 that it won't fully harden. It is well known that steels like W1 are case hardened and are very tough because of the pearlite core, you will find that in any ASM text.
Their website is very large.
You have to sign up to look at the more detailed information. There is a section where you can ask them for their handbook. It is a very detailed guide. Get it and read through it, it only took them about a week to send it to me. Look at how Carpenter describes S2 vs S7, but again there is a core issue here, they even state it specifically. S7 though has a nice combination of hardness/toughness, the really tough steels are much softer, usually 45/55 HRC.
I only wanted to point out that top flight knife makers use Crucible steel. I honestly believe they chose those steels because they believe it is the best possible material for their product. I respect their decisions.
That is the ideal customer responce. I was just pointing out that a lot of people feel they are not only ideal, they are actually POOR steels for knives. Again, you can't ask the people selling a material for an unbiased opinion on it, of course they are going to tell you it is great. Ask someone who sells the opposite and the reality is likely inbetween.
-Cliff
); we have no specifications on “edge retention” from ASME, AISI, or anyone else I can find. So we extrapolate edge retention from wear resistance and hardness. Two metals having the same hardness should have edge retention approximately equivalent to its wear resistance. Would you agree?