Sounds like you've either had some seriously bad luck with s30v, or you're putting it through tasks it shouldn't do at angles that aren't meant for the task. I'm guessing it's more due to bad luck. But chopping wood at angles lower than 20 degrees will always open doors for edge issues. I've put quite a bit of s30v through its paces and not had these issues. There were some over heated edges on some Spydies with s30v back in the day but after a sharpen they were good to go with no micro chipping.
Not micro-chipping but micro-folding, which you can't see unless you rub your nail and it grabs some material off of it on one side only.
As you say, Micro-rolling, and other troubles, are common when chopping wood below 20 per side (around 15 per side is about where I go for chopping, and about half the knives I own fail being trouble-free chopping at that angle: This quite independent of price!), but micro-rolling should appear only slowly, after 30-50 hits, in a very thin depth, and with only a little nail grab that is not completely continuous but "stutters".
All CPM steels I ever tried micro-roll instantly and severely (almost visible by eye) on the very first few hits on wood, even on a very thick 0.040"-0.050" edge base, and even at near 20 degree angles... An RJ Martin Raven was like that, and so was another custom maker in CPM-154. A Gerber 70th anniversary Mk II dagger in S30V had instant and solid micro-folding from
slicing the 1/16" thin cardboard of an Evian water bottle box, with the dagger's barely retouched factory edge (but it is a near-zero edge from the factory, so fairly thin even with my added micro-bevel)... I saw this same kind of "slicing" micro-folding on the same cardboard from a cheap Kershaw folder as well...
The reason chips are always mentioned as failures is because people can actually
see them...: They don't really see micro-folding, and to be honest it can't really be felt while cutting until you slice phonebook paper: On CPM stainless it probably just hangs on forever, but it does create drag on the cut, even if it still cuts. In most cases it probably just leans and leans and continues to cut in this condition, getting worse and taller until sharpening removes it, but never breaking or wearing off from actual use... Only rubbing the nail can really detect it, and people tend to assume failure is by micro-chipping alone... Even good steel, like 440C, D-2 or Japanese treated Aus-6/Aus-8, will micro-roll a little after a fair amount of hard use at 15 per side: The difference is the speed, the continuity and especially the tallness of the micro-fold, compared to what I saw in CPM steels when chopping...
The tallness of the roll is the biggest problem (when it grabs a lot of nail shavings) , NOT the cutting performance loss, because of the height it takes to erase the roll, which means your edge geometry opens up faster. It is not really an edge performance loss issue, but a geometry height loss issue, which over time becomes a performance loss.
Note that a micro-fold is not quite a wire edge: It has no visible bent "base": It is more like a smooth "orientation" of the apex,
which is why it does not break off like a wire edge, but instead becomes taller and taller with use, as the "bend" curls deeper and deeper into the edge, often until it becomes visible without nail shavings.
Gaston
