Chuck Bybee said:
Carbides are not a bonus, steels are designed to have carbides!
I didn't say just any carbides, I said super hard ones. Having carbides much harder than usual is an add-on, not a replacement for overall hardness of the steel. As you noted in detail, not all carbides are equal.
However, as your data also shows, having carbides harder than the overall steel is not exactly special either. Only the levels are unique.
And again, in real world conditions, Talonite outlasts steel cutters 5 to 1.
Only for some jobs, as you noted. Food processing mills are probably closer to grinding and ripping than slicing, though there are obviously different things to be done to different foods.
It's probably also for tools that are discarded rather than sharpened. Remember that hardness is also important for sharpening ability in knives, which is one of the major complaints about steels with high wear resistance and low hardness.
Then you wrote. "The extra hard carbides are only slightly better than the stuff holding them in place." If you look at the list of carbide hardnesses, you will see the steel you were concern about has primarily vanadium carbides which are very evenly dispersed through the steel via the CPM process. The vanadium carbides have a hardness more than twenty points higher than the steel you mentioned.
I meant that as a "only as strong as the weakest link" kind of statement, but when I read it again it doesn't sound right. I did not think 70rc was only slightly better than 40, but a "good" thing is limited by the "goodness" of what holds it in place. I do acknowledge that it is still better to have harder carbides even with the same steel hardness, so I worded it in a slightly positive way, but the point is the resulting steel steel is nowhere near as good as how good the carbides do their job. The carbides might be really hard, but they are only as "useful" as the stuff holding them in place.
