if infi steel is really as good as people say, why no close copy?

The Mastiff said:
Pickering, You can get higher RC's with cryo on some steels and heat schedules. It's not hype if done where called for.
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So it's all about the heat treat with the knife steels? I believe they claim that it "stess-relieves" the metal in the case of rifle barrels, whatever that really means. I was just wondering, as clearly there is much disagreement about the value of cryo treating steels among experts in the field. I have heard plenty of good things about Busse knives, for sure. Thanks, Paul.
 
pickering said:
So it's all about the heat treat with the knife steels? I believe they claim that it "stess-relieves" the metal in the case of rifle barrels, whatever that really means. I was just wondering, as clearly there is much disagreement about the value of cryo treating steels among experts in the field. I have heard plenty of good things about Busse knives, for sure. Thanks, Paul.
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The best steel in the world can be reduced to nothing better than wrought iron with bad heat treating. The steel busse uses is not some mystical formulation handed down from Vulcan. What is diferent is the heatreating,

From the Scrapyard web site:

It is in this process that the very soul of a blades performance will be born. It can also be the most expensive process involved in the making of a fine blade. Sadly, the knife buying public has been led to believe that Rockwell Hardness is some sort of gauge by which to determine performance. This is ridiculous! Following standard ASTM heat treating and tempering protocols, a blade made from a standard tool steel can be "properly" heat treated and tempered in less than 1-1/2 hours and brought to a hardness of 57-59 Rc. So what! Take one of our blades that has received our proprietary heat treat and tempering protocol of over 40 hrs. and it will also test out at 57-59 Rc. The fact is that one of our transversion wave tempered SR-77 blades that tests out at 57-59 Rc will spank the living hell out of a standard heat treated knife blade out of the same material that also has a 57-59 Rc hardness.

Grain structure and carbide distribution, are the keys to great performance NOT Rockwell hardness!
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The performance is in how the steel is cooked not in the steel no hype........
 
jbmonkey said:
wow, thanks to everyone, and i can henstly say i am more confused and unsure than when i started this quest.:)

actually i think i can safely say that that magic in infi steel is the hands that built the knife in the form of high attention to extreme quality standards and a steel that is pretty good and the rest is what it is..... marketing. safe enough assumption? thanks!
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I can go with that.
 
Thanks for the heads up.
Indeed, Crucible's data seems to indicate that S-5 would be tougher at a high hardness. Chances are people like S-7 because it air hardens.
Sigh, once again manufacturing convenience wins over performance.
 
I am no big fan boy-of any company for that matter, and I work hard for my money-believe me. But- as much as I will admit the blades are pricey. They are the BEST quality knives you can buy-and are made in the good old US. Yeh, everyone knows all the mumbo jumbo about the heat treat enigmas and what not- but just borrow-purchase-steal or whatever you got to do to try one. The blades are bullet proof and I would put my life on the line with one. That being said- hell yeah, there are a lot of good knife makers. I LOVE doziers and think D2 is awesome steel too and whatever those boys in Arkansas are doing- there doing top notch work. That's come from a true blue Yankee. Even the Busse kin blades such as the swamp rat are some of the highest quality blades you can buy. Swamp Rats I would argue are some of the best bang for your buck in the industry. Re: slicers- and all that- yeh, if I want a skinner I use a Dozier- but there are tons of "anorexic" blade models the past few years that are amazing slicers. (Cabs, Muks, etc) Whatever the magic or the secret- I don't even care-I use the knives hard and if they broke on me or even came close to not being a good product-I would say so. If I was suddenly ushered off to Iraq for a deployment- and my life thus being on the line- I would be packing several of my Busse/ Swamp Rat blades and have one attached to my tactical vest at all times. That's what I think of them after purchasing several and being a collector of their blades. Proof is in the pudding. Search you tube and theres tons of stuff-not made by Busse- made by very very happy customers. Just my .02
 
Simply put Id say,
Q: Why no copy's?
A: Plenty of great steel out there already that will do the job just fine.
The industry just sees no need in it..Im sure some company could copy it if they wanted to bad enough and wanted to spend enough money doing it. Just no profitable for them to do it id say.
 
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I don't own any infi, but I have been to knife tests.com. They do destruction tests of several different brands of knives to see what they can take before they break. Infi seems to hold up to more punishment then any other brand knife. Just an observation.
 
I think what "convinced" me of infi wasn't people praising it or claims, but the knife test videos of smacking it with a steel mallet into welding into a pipe until it broke. I think infi makes amazing chopper steel, but as a slicer you have better options. It's like how swamp rat's sr-101 is pretty much ball bearing steel w/ patented heat treating. I think a lot of it is the heat treating part
 
I think what "convinced" me of infi wasn't people praising it or claims, but the knife test videos of smacking it with a steel mallet into welding into a pipe until it broke. I think infi makes amazing chopper steel, but as a slicer you have better options. It's like how swamp rat's sr-101 is pretty much ball bearing steel w/ patented heat treating. I think a lot of it is the heat treating part
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Patented heat treating? Have you ever seen the patent?

Also, that ball bearing steel you are talking about is 52100. An excellent performing steel all around. It doesn't take a patented heat treat or a fake name to make it an excellent steel.

BG42 is a ball bearing steel as well. A stainless version of M50. It's an excellent stainless cutlery steel as well. Most blades
are made of steels designed for something else that just happens to also work well in knives. There are very few steels on the market designed for the cutlery market.

I don't mind Busse's sort of over the top advertising rhetoric but I think taking excellent steels, renaming them and trying to claim them as your own special "proprietary" steel silly at best, and disingenuous at worst. To be honest it made me not trust the company at first. Now, I just sort of shake my head and ignore what they are doing.

I felt the same about Cold Steel and "carbon V"
 
But isn't the "proprietary" heat treat what sets any maker or smith apart from another? In other words, if we gave them all the same lump of any random steel and let them heat treat them as they see fit, aren't all of the makers entitled to "proprietary" as a label for the steel after they've heat treated it? I'm not sure how Dozier markets their D2 but it always comes with the "no one knows how to treat D2 like Dozier" disclaimer and I don't see how Jerry Busse is really any different. I agree with you on the rhetorical marketing but I don't find it to be disingenuous especially given their customer service and outstanding warranty. On the contrary, on the Scrap Yard and Swamp Rat websites they openly admit to using an available steel and giving it their unique heat treatment; the new name/acronym can be seen as unnecessary or simply marketing savvy but the transparency allows you to see the sincerity of the maker and their belief in their product.
 
Busse guards the heat treating Protocol very well in fact they will not answer any questiond regarding it period.....

Thats why you won't see a patant on it. Patants call for full disclosure and are public. All some one would have to do is make small changes in the process to avoid infringement.

Jerry seems to understand a great deal about bringing out the best in alloys whether it S7, 52100 or 154CM after he gets done with them they just seem to perform better. The knives that he makes are top shelf and are more knife than 99% need.

Knives are tools and for most harbor freight socket sets will do just fine but some demand a bit better why? because we know that sometimes life demands a bit more.....
 
I have not used Infi, so I am just speaking as someone who has read a lot of opinions and reviewes (as well as marketing) about a lot of different steels. To me, the thing that sticks out about a few steels, like Infi and 3V, is the attempt to portray them as having no downsides. With most steels, what you see and hear is that they may excel in one area but have issues in other areas. For example, I have seen a lot about cpm m4 having great wear resistance, but that coming at the expense of less toughness. Then you have steels that are more "do it all," but, as a result, don't pop off the charts in any one area.

On the other hand, when you hear about Infi or 3V, it is often that it not only is way tougher than anything else, but also has off the charts wear resistence, edge retention, etc. In other words, it is better than everything else, in every respect. I am highly skeptical whenever there are no downsides, as it seems to defy science. Also, I have seen plenty of information that suggest that Infi does have a downside--it sounds like it doesn't hold an edge nearly as well as, say, a cpm m4 or s90v. I can't say whether it is true, but it seems to me to sound more like the natural give and take of things.

I am actually researching this issue with respect to the heralded cpm 3V.
 
In my experience, INFI acts almost like (mostly) stainless 5160. Which makes it pretty amazing.
Except I found you can thin 5160 out at the edge a bit more, (like 20 deg inclusive) and INFI holds an edge a bit better.
In that style knife I prefer CPM 3V, but it is much harder to sharpen, and can be bit of a nightmare to re bevel if it's thick behind the edge.
 
There are trade offs, INFI may not hold an edge as good as some other steels but then again those steels may lack toughness or latteral strength. Think of INFI as broad spectrum, it performs very well across the board which lends it's self to a wide range of tasks where as some of the other steels are more tuned to perform well in a certain areas such as edge retention.
 
The Mastiff said:
... I think taking excellent steels, renaming them and trying to claim them as your own special "proprietary" steel silly at best, and disingenuous at worst
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Most of the steel companies do the same. Take standard spec, make steel according to that, and give it a proprietary name. Then promote "proprietary" steel. In both cases if you dig, you can easily find base standard steel.
I don't think it's something unusual, and perhaps Jerry has better reason to rename steel after HT than steel company does. It's not like he's hiding.
 
You can say that it is all about the heat treat and you would be right, but the steel that you start with also matters. If you can manage the tricky heat treat on something like Champaloy L6, you will get one tough knife, but it will not hold an edge like a steel with some vanadium in the mix. What little that I have heard about the Dozier D2 knives is that he went a slightly different direction than the mills recommend and ended up with a heat treat that solves the old "takes a crappy edge and holds it forever" issue with D2. I seem to recall that it had to do with reducing the size of the big honking chromium carbides, but I may be wrong. What I have heard about the Busse knives from some of my English friends who actually engage in the sacrilege of reprofiling the knives with a finer, polished convex edge is that they are tough as nails, but tend to have an edge geometry akin to a slightly blunt shovel.
 
Kirk_Ferentz said:
I have not used Infi, so I am just speaking as someone who has read a lot of opinions and reviewes (as well as marketing) about a lot of different steels. To me, the thing that sticks out about a few steels, like Infi and 3V, is the attempt to portray them as having no downsides. With most steels, what you see and hear is that they may excel in one area but have issues in other areas. For example, I have seen a lot about cpm m4 having great wear resistance, but that coming at the expense of less toughness. Then you have steels that are more "do it all," but, as a result, don't pop off the charts in any one area.

On the other hand, when you hear about Infi or 3V, it is often that it not only is way tougher than anything else, but also has off the charts wear resistence, edge retention, etc. In other words, it is better than everything else, in every respect. I am highly skeptical whenever there are no downsides, as it seems to defy science. Also, I have seen plenty of information that suggest that Infi does have a downside--it sounds like it doesn't hold an edge nearly as well as, say, a cpm m4 or s90v. I can't say whether it is true, but it seems to me to sound more like the natural give and take of things.

I am actually researching this issue with respect to the heralded cpm 3V.
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That's the great thing about powder metallurgy, you get to cheat the system. If you compare S90V with 440C (new technology vs. old technology), as far as performance in the blade is concerned 440C has no upside. It's just inferior.
The new trade off is manufacturing ability, difficulties in shaping steel have put a limit on the types of alloys that can reasonably be used.

When you look at 3V, I don't doubt that you actually get a ton of wear resistance with little to no downside when compared with similar "non-powdered" steel. The question here is whether or not wear resistance is actually useful when mated with extreme shock resistance. The practical application of the two abilities usually looks very different.
I think Stirder's use of 3V in a folder may actually be one of the best applications of the steel I've seen thus far. They market their stuff as "super tough" but most people EDC their knives like any other. This way they can actually give you a super tough blade that will perform well in EDC at the same time.
 
Most of the steel companies do the same. Take standard spec, make steel according to that, and give it a proprietary name. Then promote "proprietary" steel. In both cases if you dig, you can easily find base standard steel.
I don't think it's something unusual, and perhaps Jerry has better reason to rename steel after HT than steel company does. It's not like he's hiding.
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I disagree. If you go to Latrobe and order M2 steel, they won't have trouble finding it because they call it "double six" in house. You could also order it by the european designation if you want, JIS, or Bohler's or the chinese counterpart and everybody will be on the same page. No effort to conceal it's true name, origin, or anything else about it is made. It's not the same story with knifemakers taking steels produced by others and attempting to conceal it's name, origin and claim it as their own invention.

Kershaw had a steel tweaked for their needs yet did not attempt to hide it's source or true nature. They made an arrangement to have exclusive use for a set period of time but that's it. I have more respect for that. There's nothing illegal or immoral about what Busse did. I just don't respect that way of doing business.
 
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