I just like a fine edge...period.

[Jrunr619]

Thanks. The finest blade with a dull edge is lipstick on a pig.

I prefer the finest blade with the finest edge.

 

[skyhorse]

In fact, high carbon blades (which are my favorite, by the way) will deteriorate at the micro level. I have noticed time and again where I leave a high carbon blade with a super fine edge in a drawer, and some weeks later, I come back to it and the keen edge is gone--almost as though on a microscopic level it fell away in the way that rust would eat the blade completely over time.

Keep a strop in that drawer with some black & green compound , problem solved.

 

[Gaston444]

Well, ya see, with steel metalurgy there's these thingamabobs called carbides.



Not everybody sucks at sharpening. And if your idea of a fine edge is one where the wire edge snaps off and leaves a clean edge behind, then you really need to step up your game.



Age is irrelevant. Composition and heat treat are. People are learning new things with heat treats as well as improving existing steels by tweaking the composition or inventing new ways to use existing compositions better, such as particle metallurgy, which give steel a more uniform carbide matrix, allowing for increased wear resistance and finer edges.

I'm sure you've passed numerous blind tests where you could tell the carbide size and density with 100% accuracy...

I just love hearing about knives and steel getting better from people who think a 20 dps main edge bevel is appropriate on a folder... Especially when they say that CPMs are a huge step forward. That particular bit is just priceless...

There is weirdness going on in that all that great "progress" is leading to increasingly useless, dull, low performance and non-durable knives. Cliff Stamp noticed this as well: Note the part about edge angles, steel and old axes:

http://www.cliffstamp.com/knives/forum/read.php?5,2040

" It thus can be determined for example that in 440A stainless, with an optimal soak, 0.48% of carbon is in solution and thus a maximum hardness of 60 HRC can be obtained.

Note the high carbide steels actually decrease the hardness usually because they are not balanced to produce hardness but they are created to produce a large volume of primary carbides and thus they are very far to the right of the carbon saturation line. As noted, this is because for the purposes they are created, a high wear resistance is required. But again in the tool industry, this isn't a difficult problem, the steels used for knives never have a high primary carbide aggregate as this doesn't assist edge retention at high sharpness. Steels designed for retaining a high sharpness are steels such as the F series, the tungsten grades, the white/blue series, etc. . However there is a very curious thing which happened in the cutlery specific industry which I have never seen anyone explain, or even source how it happened.

If you read books from some time ago and look at the edge angles they are all very low, even axes have very low angles. As a specific example, in Cook's book (1921) you will see the edge angles of a swamper axe at 17.5 dps. If you scan modern small folders, 17.5 dpi would be considered a low angle - however this is a full size swamping axe, and these were the utility axes used to cut limbs roots, etc. which were ground with steep angles because they were not meant to cut well, but be durable. A full size felling axe would be ground to 15 dps, and again this is a full size felling axe swung by able bodied men and slamming into traditional NA woods. Note as well that this was the final apex angle, it quickly swept back into a lower angle to provide relief. When I started years ago writing about edge angles on chopping knives in the 8-10 dps range and 12-14 micro-bevels I received quite a lot of flak as this was quite in opposite to current convention thinking. The reason this happened is because now the steels used on all knives, even large ones are extremely idiotic choices in general. They are ultra brittle, extremely high carbide steels which have forced the more than doubling of edge angles on cutlery.

...and thus a move towards using materials which, while not working well at a high sharpness, do work very well at a low sharpness as once very large angles are used and once a tolerance for very low sharpness is acceptable - then the solution is no longer F2 it is D7 ."


To "tolerance for low sharpness" read as "20 dps is sharp", and to compensate for this inherent bluntness a super high polish with hair whittling is promoted. We are just swimming in progress here...

Gaston

 

[danbot]

I'm sure you've passed numerous blind tests where you could tell the carbide size and density with 100% accuracy...

I just love hearing about knives and steel getting better from people who think a 20 dps main edge bevel is appropriate on a folder... Especially when they say that CPMs are a huge step forward. That particular bit is just priceless...

There is weirdness going on in that all that great "progress" is leading to increasingly useless, dull, low performance and non-durable knives. Cliff Stamp noticed this as well: Note the part about edge angles, steel and old axes:

http://www.cliffstamp.com/knives/forum/read.php?5,2040

" It thus can be determined for example that in 440A stainless, with an optimal soak, 0.48% of carbon is in solution and thus a maximum hardness of 60 HRC can be obtained.

Note the high carbide steels actually decrease the hardness usually because they are not balanced to produce hardness but they are created to produce a large volume of primary carbides and thus they are very far to the right of the carbon saturation line. As noted, this is because for the purposes they are created, a high wear resistance is required. But again in the tool industry, this isn't a difficult problem, the steels used for knives never have a high primary carbide aggregate as this doesn't assist edge retention at high sharpness. Steels designed for retaining a high sharpness are steels such as the F series, the tungsten grades, the white/blue series, etc. . However there is a very curious thing which happened in the cutlery specific industry which I have never seen anyone explain, or even source how it happened.

If you read books from some time ago and look at the edge angles they are all very low, even axes have very low angles. As a specific example, in Cook's book (1921) you will see the edge angles of a swamper axe at 17.5 dps. If you scan modern small folders, 17.5 dpi would be considered a low angle - however this is a full size swamping axe, and these were the utility axes used to cut limbs roots, etc. which were ground with steep angles because they were not meant to cut well, but be durable. A full size felling axe would be ground to 15 dps, and again this is a full size felling axe swung by able bodied men and slamming into traditional NA woods. Note as well that this was the final apex angle, it quickly swept back into a lower angle to provide relief. When I started years ago writing about edge angles on chopping knives in the 8-10 dps range and 12-14 micro-bevels I received quite a lot of flak as this was quite in opposite to current convention thinking. The reason this happened is because now the steels used on all knives, even large ones are extremely idiotic choices in general. They are ultra brittle, extremely high carbide steels which have forced the more than doubling of edge angles on cutlery.

...and thus a move towards using materials which, while not working well at a high sharpness, do work very well at a low sharpness as once very large angles are used and once a tolerance for very low sharpness is acceptable - then the solution is no longer F2 it is D7 ."


To "tolerance for low sharpness" read as "20 dps is sharp", and to compensate for this inherent bluntness a super high polish with hair whittling is promoted. We are just swimming in progress here...

Gaston

Nice cherry picking of info there. A swamper axe is not a splitting axe. If it was it would be sharpened ~20-30 dps.
And sharp is sharp. Just because an edge is 30° per side, does not mean it's dull. I wouldn't want to shave with it, but I wouldn't want to try to chop wood with a 5° per side straight razor either!

 

[Planterz]

I'm sure you've passed numerous blind tests where you could tell the carbide size and density with 100% accuracy...

And you have too?

I just love hearing about knives and steel getting better from people who think a 20 dps main edge bevel is appropriate on a folder... Especially when they say that CPMs are a huge step forward. That particular bit is just priceless...

It works for me. It works for lots of people that actually use their knives. And by "use", I don't mean whacking logs. BTW, the "C" in "CPM" means "Crucible", as in the company that holds the name. Also, it's CPM®. Powdered metallurgy isn't unique to one company. Is your crusade against powdered metallurgy in general, or that of just a single company. See, when you fail to recognize the difference, you lose credibility (not that you had any to begin with).

There is weirdness going on in that all that great "progress" is leading to increasingly useless, dull, low performance and non-durable knives. Cliff Stamp blah blah blah blah blah

Aaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnd..that's as far as I need to read that. You keep citing Cliff Stamp as a source, but nobody here with any understanding of the Scientific Method recognize him as credible. He was banned her over 10 years ago because people disagreed with his unscientific "testing" and he refused to acknowledge or consider anybody else's results, and would be a complete prick when arguing about it. Plus, he badmouthed the owner of bladeforums one too many times.

To "tolerance for low sharpness" read as "20 dps is sharp", and to compensate for this inherent bluntness a super high polish with hair whittling is promoted. We are just swimming in progress here...

I'll let you in on a little secret: I have no idea what my edges are sharpened at. I have an Edge Pro that I've used to reprofile. I don't know what angle it was set at, because I didn't get out a digital protractor (I don't own one). I set the angles by eyeballing it. It's been years since I've actually used it, although a couple knives are getting to the point that I need to. In the meantime, I touch up my knives by freehanding. Like people have done for centuries.

How can I possibly know how sharp my edges are? Because they cut. They cut well. If they don't cut well, I sharpen them until they do cut well. They cut newspaper/phonebook paper cleanly. They cut cardboard. They cut wood. They cut plastic. They shave arm hair. Occasionally, they cut my own skin (not on purpose).

The OP likes a fine edge. Great. I like an edge somewhere in the middle between fine and coarse, perhaps leaning more towards fine. It depends on the knife though. I also have stockmans that have different edges on different blades. Main blade has a "normal" edge, sheepsfoot has a coarse edge, and the pen blade will have a thin, polished edge. I also have serrated edges. Different edges, different uses. None of which involve chopping wood. I do not chop wood, so I do not own a knife for chopping wood. If I did buy a knife for chopping wood, I would take that in to consideration on how to sharpen it. I would not assume that the type of edges that I have on my other knives would apply properly to a wood chopping knife because they are not used for chopping wood.