Has Anyone Considered Hard Chroming Knives?

C

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Hard chrome is an incredibly hard coating that is usually applied as a handgun finish. The bonding characteristics are greater with the chrome to steel than steel to steel, meaning it can't flake off. It's used not only for corrosion resistance, but to virtually stop wear and tear of parts that work against each other. The hardness makes it almost impossible to scratch, even in a pocket full of coins, and when polished looks like shiny stainless steel.

Now hard chroming won't affect the sharpness of a blade, but it might keep the internal parts of knives from wearing over time. That means one would have the ability to snap open and close a knife indefinitely without wearing of parts. It also would mean a user could use his blade on almost any type of material without it scratching up or marring the finish.

Linerlock and lockback knives all will wear over time, as will many other types, but hard chroming might be a way of halting wear on an expensive knife just as it stops the wear of a pawl in a revolver against a ratchet. Colt Pythons slipped in and out of time as the tiny pawls wore, but when hard chromed, wear would virtually cease.

Metalife is a great hard chrome, as is Armoloy and others. I've never heard of them doing knives, but I thought I'd toss it out in the event anyone would like to try it. Mahovsky's hard chromed one of my favorite Beretta pistols that had some rust issues. It was almost a brand new pistol, but I was told by other owners that their same model guns had the same rust problem. Anyway, in the early days of stainless, when various stainless steels gauled against each other, hard chroming put an end to it.

Anyway, just a suggestion.
 
IIRC there were some hard chromed carbon steel knives produced in the 60s.
 
Interesting thought. I have a hard-chromed Colt McCormick Commander that, after many thousands of rounds and about 20 years of almost daily carry, could pass for brand new.
 
I have suggested it for quite a while.
IHC will decrease wear, but won't stop it. IHC can be scratched, but it is harder than most materials.
It's best use would be to rustproof carbon steel blades.
Electroless nickel, while softer, should do the same thing.
 
Not a bad idea but I thought coatings like TiNi and DLC had that covered. I can maybe see some advantages in the lock area but as far as putting it on the blade I think the other coatings are better. IIRC the DLC coating adds strength to the blade.
 
The DLC-type coatings are superior to hard chrome, but you can't get 1 or 2 blades done economically. You can with chrome or electroless nickel.
Plating blades is not new. DLC does not add strength to a blade.
 
Well, titanium and other coatings scratch and wear off. They also become unsightly.

I wasn't so much thinking blade as mechanism. I know that wear occurs slowly in knives, but if you have a linerlock or some other mechanism that wears over time, hard chroming should stop it in its tracks.

Years ago we had to pieces of chromed steel. One was polished; the other had kind of a very light green tint to it. We couldn't files the finish off of it, and while we could scratch the unfinished piece (and scratch isn't really the word...maybe "mar" is). These scratches could be buffed out easily, but then you'd have part of the steel polished and part not. But when we took the polished steel, you could put it in a pocket full of change and you really couldn't see any serious marring at all.

When two interacting parts are chrome plated, wear is reduced to almost nothing. People who had revolvers would have internal parts polished and then chromed. This kept slight surface corrosion from forming and making the action less slick (stainless, BTW, has a slight chromium content that rides on top of the steel and keeps that surface corrosion from forming). But once a gunsmith had a revolver all tuned, the user can then have it hard chromed, nearly freezing it in time. Even the inside of barrels would resist wear much better.

Hard chrome has a hardness of about 71 on the Rockwell "C" Scale and will not chip, crack or peel. It's also highly rust resistant and has a maximum build up of only .0002", meaning that it won't affect even exacting tolerances. The hard chrome plating process fills the pores of the base material to form a molecular bond that is virtually unbreakable.

If I had an expensive knife, particularly a folder, and wanted to keep it forever, I'd try it. It's a gorgeous finish, too, and with a RC of 71, you're not likely to scratch it much.
 
It would reduce wear on the blade. But the blade doesn't really have appreciable wear in the first place. The washers wear just as much as the blade if not more, and that being said will last many many years with care. The coating will do nothing for flicking a knife open as that affects the stop pins and that's another story all together.

I thing it's a great coating, it's used in countless machine parts that require wear resistance and does the job extremely well until gummed up with other materials. Normally it will never wear of in the parts service life.

It's a handsome coating that definitely has a place in the knife industry. IIRC the chroming process is rather toxic though, quite a bit more toxic than other surface coatings. That may be a reason it's not that popular.

I like the idea.
 
I hear you, but that's what I'm talkin' about. Just coating the blade will do nothing but cut down on scratches, but in a folder, you'd want to hard chrome the bottom of the blade, the liner lock itself, the pins and anything else that wears. In a linerlock, the normal wear and tear can be virtually stopped. In an axis lock, all internal parts can be coated. Hard chrome will not increase the overall strength of any part, but it will virtually stop all surface wear.

Again, the venerable Colt Python is a great .357, but it goes out of time faster than many other similar magnums because the pawl, or hand that pushes the cylinder into place with every pull of the trigger, was designed undersized. I've known people who have shot full house magnum ammo and after about 2,500 rounds the pawl will wear just enough to not fully rotate the cylinder into proper alignment with the barrel. But when they hard chrome the pawl and the ratchet, the wear becomes almost zero. That tiny amount of hard chrome on both bearing surfaces will not wear off.

On a knife, I think if you'd plate all moving and interacting parts—anything that wears—that you would see that your tolerances remain as they are. If you plated the blade, you could cut cardboard, wood and almost anything else and that your blade would be protected from the nicks and scratches. Cosmetic? Of course, but the moving parts would be protected from wear and corrosion.

One handgunner noted: "If you plan to get an action job on your gun, do it BEFORE you get it plated, because the finish is so hard as to make an action job after plating virtually impossible (at least with the plated parts)."

I don't have any stock or interest in any of these companies, but I think the knife community has overlooked this incredible technology, and there are many different grades available.

Armoloy has perhaps the best hard chroming of anyone. On their website, take note of these incredible properties that should be of interest to both knife makers and knife owners:
Armoloy TDC is a hard, thin, dense chrome coating with a micro-nodular surface texture that was developed to protect a wide range of tools and components. The Armoloy TDC (thin dense chrome) coating is applied in a chemical bath by means of a proprietary process. Armoloy TDC has a hardness of 78 Rc; XADC-Armoloy features the inclusion of a synthetic nano-diamond particulate, to the TDC bath, resulting in hardness of 98 Rc.

When first introduced in 1957, Armoloy TDC provided a 70 Rc surface hardness. During 2000, the company embarked on a series of experiments to improve this property, resulting in a surface hardness of 78 Rc. The same excellent adhesion, high ductility, and have corrosion resistance of Armoloy TDC have not been compromised with the improved hardness level.

To develop the greater hardness, density has been increased. Therefore, when properly engineered on metal components, the Armoloy TDC coating provides exceptional resistance to wear and corrosion, in addition to greatly reduced friction.

The coating also features a microscopic, nodular surface finish. This nodular finish reduces the amount of surface area exposed to parts in contact with it, thereby substantially reducing wear and friction rates. Furthermore, our micro-nodulation retains lubricants longer, further reducing friction. In other words, reduced surface area + high hardness = longer wear rate = longer wear life.

Another important aspect of Armoloy TDC is the uniformity of the deposit thickness of the coatings, which are typically applied at 1,0 to 17,5 microns (0.000040 to 0.0007 in.). Thinner coatings can be applied with a higher degree of uniformity to a tightly toleranced component. The recommended deposit thickness range of 2,5 to 7,5 microns (0.0001 to 0.0003 in.) is uniform to within +/- 0,625 microns (0.000025 in.). This allows Armoloy to return a finished product to its customer and eliminates the need for post-coating operations.

Armoloy TDC coatings have been applied to bearings, tools and dies, pumps, plastic and rubber mold tooling, nuclear and aerospace parts, hydraulics, food processing equipment, and a wide variety of components where wear, abrasion, high friction and corrosion environments are prevalent.

In 1997, after three years of research and development, Armoloy introduced XADC, its newest coating which attains a surface hardness of 98 Rc through the addition of synthetic nano-diamond particulate to the TDC bath. In addition to its 98 Rc hardness, its coefficient of friction is 20% lower than that of other TDC coatings.

Western Michigan University Study

A recent study by Dr. Paul Engelmann and others at Western Michigan University demonstrated XADC's outstanding performance. The XADC-Armoloy coating outperformed standard hard chrome plating, electroless nickel, and titanium nitride in an injection molding application on copper-base metal tooling molding a 33% glass-filled nylon, a highly abrasive plastic resin. As the table shows, XADC-coated C18000 copper survived for 635,000 cycles. Armoloy TDC-coated copper persisted for 155,000 cycles, and titanium nitride tolerated only 57,000 cycles.​
This, of course, represents the upper crust of the technology, but even the standard hard chroming can substantially increase the life of a good knife. It can even be polished to almost mirror brightness or left in matte to reduce glare. Imagine breaking down your Sebenza, having it hard chromed, then put back together.

I've seen it work on guns, so I thought, why not knives?
 
Very interesting threat.
Generally I don't like coated knives but just bought a carbon steel knife with an high amount of carbon and very low on chromium.
Normally I like patina on a knife, but in this case the ease (risk) of rusting was to great.
So I chose a version finished with hard chrome.
Because I normally avoid coatings I really don't know anything about it, glad to see hard chroming is considered to be a good coating.
 
this thread is amazing, hard chroming seems like a prefect idea for knives, especially that XADC coating. How much would this cost for an all metal knife like, oh say a sebenza?
 
Aluminum parts can not be chromed, unless underplated with nickel.
 
Just when I think I know a little about blade steel and knives in general, you guys fling me back into kindergarten with a dunce cap on.:mad: Thanks alot guys.:D
 
Gerber used to hard chrome their knives. I have several kitchen knives and an A475 ( all from the 80's) that have hard chromed blades. But the edge is not chromed. It can't be as you will remove the coating when you sharpen. It does doe a reasonable job of keeping the blade looking good. But, IMHO, there are a number of modern steels that do as good a job without coating. Plus you can polish out any scratches in an uncoated steel blade.
 
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