Is W2 only for big knives?

The_KaramVit

The_KaramVit

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Jan 29, 2014
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Quick question: Is there something about W2 that limits it to only being used for big knives? Is it reasonable to use it to make a small knife?
 
There is nothing that limits W2 for smaller knives.
As a matter of facts it should even better for smaller knives because it's gonna be very hard.
 
I think a lot of people use it for bigger knives because it makes very nice hamons. A bigger blade is a larger canvas to show off that kind of feature. I made a bunch of 3.5" skinner blades with W2. Works great for that too.
 
With good HT, it has very fine grain, which should make it excellent for small blades that require a very keen crisp edge. :thumbup:
 
W2 is one of those versatile steels that can do just about anything well.
 
We have seen it used in recent years for everything from a katana designed for cutting completion down to custom slipjoints and straight razors.
 
Late in his life, Bill Moran pretty much settled on GOOD 5160 as his go to steel because he was consistently able to obtain high quality stuff and frankly, it worked well for what he was doing. But he said that W2, which had had used extensively in the past, was almost as tough as 5160 and took a better edge and held it for much longer. The reason he stopped using it was because it became very difficult to find, pure and simple. W2 is interesting stuff in that both its good qualities (toughness and great edge stabilty a higher hardness levels, ability to take a very fine edge and hold it, great hamons, enough vanadium to control grain growth) AND its quirks (shallow hardenability which makes for great hamons but leaves the spine area on bigger blades softer) combine to make it a very nice steel for all kinds of knives. You should never even think about leaving W2 at the low hardness (55-56) levels like some factories do with 1095 for sake of "toughness" Hell, you should never do that with 1095. LOL I agree with Roman Landes in that I think that no knife made from a steel like W2 should ever leave your shop any softer than 60 Rc at the edge.
 
I would say Rc62+ is ideal for W2, unless you are doing stupid, non knife related things with a knife. :confused:
 
A small knife in W2 is in my own group of standards and has the best fine edge stability of any knife I have ever tested.

I think it would be ideal in a straight razor or as a fine vegetable knife.

I agree with the comments about it being used at higher hardness.
 
Warren, I have tempered a couple of large kitchen knives at temperatures as low as 375F which makes for a screaming hard edge. Typically, i go with like 425F for hunters and MAYBE 450F for big bowies or choppers, which is still leaving it pretty darned hard. Don Hanson says that 1450F/450F will give you 61-62. Some of the old school low alloy tool steels retain amazing flexibility even at very high hardness levels. I have a little 3.75 inch spearpoint bushcraft knife made from "heavy" 1/8" 115W8 with a decent taper on the last inch plus of the blade tempered at 400 degrees, That should give me hardness maybe in the 62-63Rc range, but i can flex the tip with no problem.
Willie71 said:
I would say Rc62+ is ideal for W2, unless you are doing stupid, non knife related things with a knife. :confused:
Click to expand...
 
"I agree with Roman Landes in that I think that no knife made from a steel like W2 should ever leave your shop any softer than 60 Rc at the edge"

Jdm61 - could you please elaborate on this?

Thanks,
Chris
 
For me, steels like W2, 52100, and those hypereutectoids when run at 60+ are plenty "tough", plus the edge holding is a bit better. If there is need to be more "tough", instead of dropping RC number, choose different steel.

Certainly there are times when 5160 or S series steels, or 1050/1060 aren't available. Then it makes perfect sense to run W2 and other hypereutectoids to lower RC numbers.

If I were to leave W2 at 57, to me it is leaving performance on the table.
 
In the opinion of a number of people. myself included, If you leave it below 60, you are leaving performance on the table with no good reason to do so. Some will tell you that if you build a big 'hard use knife" from thicker W2, the spine isn't going to get nearly that hard anyway, so that kind of "toughness" will never be an issue. What a number of us have been doing the last few years is figuring out precisely how hard you can leave it at the edge and still have it perform as needed. That number has gone up a little bit for certain applications since Mr. Hanson and a few other guys started experimenting with the stuff again a number of years back. What Mr. Landes has said about fine grained steels like W2 is that the fine ausgrain matrix gives you an inherent toughness on its own and, in the case of W2, the small amount of vanadium gives you that extra bit of abrasion resistance over "plain" steel like 1095 or W1. Conventional wisdom says that W2 only has enough V to control grain growth, but recent experience has shown us that it has just enough to do some other nice things too. My general understanding is the W2 was originally formulated to solve edge chipping problems in plain water quenched tool steel like W1 so that says edge stability. What guys have discovered by playing with the austenizing temperatures is that it means VERY FINE edge stability with steel like W2 and also 52100.
 
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