L-6 Steel Maintenance?

C

Cromag

Joined
Aug 2, 2006
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I met this knife maker from Colorado named Barry Dawson. He was really funny and had a lot of very nice knives with a few different kinds of steel. I hesitated a lot on picking this one because I was not familiar with the steel. It's L-6 steel with with hard line and canvas micarta. He called it a 4" Trailing Point and it came with a kydex sheath.

Now that I've had it for a few days, I really like the 'look' of it even more. Not sure how to take care of it or what type of sharpening to do to it.

Also, what do you guys/gals know about this L-6 blade for a n00b.
I don't think it's a low maintenance knife.

Barry Dawson 4" Trailing Point
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Notice the line
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I also picked up a little 3" Ken Onion Leek in red ano (the one on the right)
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The L-6 I have heard of is used on swords ($5000.00 and up). Not sure what the up-keep is on it but I think you got an awesome knife.
TC
 
L-6 is a real working steel rather than a decorator steel. It's an alloy they use for power saw blades so it has to hold an edge well and really, really, not break. Some people just grind knives out of saw blades without any additional heat treating. This is really softer than is optimal, but leaves you with a very tough blade. You would hope with a fancier knife that it is put through a full annealing, hardening and tempering process. This would be optimized to get the edge harder than a saw blade at some sacrifice in toughness.

L-6 is a non-stainless steel. It will rust or corrode. I would be sure to clean and dry it after use. It will develope a greyish patina with time even if you keep it clean. L-6 can be a little hard to debur when you sharpen it. After normal honing increase your honing angle by 10 degrees and do a few light edge-forwards honing strokes on alternate sides of the blade. This may help if the edge doesn't seem to be getting sharp through your normal technique.
 
L6 has one of the lowest corrosion resistances of the cutlery steel, so much so that it can actually rust during cutting acidic foods while you are doing the cutting. You really need to keep it dry and in general it doesn't offer good performance as a cutting steel in wet or corrosive enviroments.

-Cliff
 
Very interesting info. Thank you, everyone!

He told me to use a bit of WD40 on it after use or for storage. Said his daugther Lynn, also a knife maker prefers vegetable oil. www.lynncookknives.com is her website.

What he explain to me about the tempering was that he heated only the blade part of the knife to 1600F and then cooled it in oil. He showed me the line which you can see in the closeup of the blade. Behind the line the steel is softer. I guess after 25years of doing this typo of thing you get a good sense of how the steel reacts to the process.
Jeff Clark said:
L-6 is a real working steel rather than a decorator steel. It's an alloy they use for power saw blades so it has to hold an edge well and really, really, not break. Some people just grind knives out of saw blades without any additional heat treating. This is really softer than is optimal, but leaves you with a very tough blade. You would hope with a fancier knife that it is put through a full annealing, hardening and tempering process. This would be optimized to get the edge harder than a saw blade at some sacrifice in toughness.

L-6 is a non-stainless steel. It will rust or corrode. I would be sure to clean and dry it after use. It will develope a greyish patina with time even if you keep it clean. L-6 can be a little hard to debur when you sharpen it. After normal honing increase your honing angle by 10 degrees and do a few light edge-forwards honing strokes on alternate sides of the blade. This may help if the edge doesn't seem to be getting sharp through your normal technique.
Click to expand...
 
Cliff Stamp said:
L6 has one of the lowest corrosion resistances of the cutlery steel, so much so that it can actually rust during cutting acidic foods while you are doing the cutting. You really need to keep it dry and in general it doesn't offer good performance as a cutting steel in wet or corrosive enviroments.

-Cliff
Click to expand...
hmmm. So what would be a "dry non-corrosive" enviornment?
 
To clearify, I meant edge retention, it will be low in such steels when they are wet, it is really humid or you are cutting acidic foods. For example I have done chopping work in just light mist and you can actually see rust form on blades during the minutes between when you cut poles and when you last them to a tree to form a lean-to. On some acidic foods it is faster still and stainless steels can even have better edge holding because the corrosion will dominate the blunting on the non-stainless steel.

However such steels in general still have other abilities such as they can take a very fine edge, they are easy to grind even when very hard and still be very tough at a high hardness so they can combine high edge retention in many forms with high ease of sharpening. However I would not want an L6 kitchen knife or fillet knife. Ideally I would move towards one of the higher chrome tool steels, you generally don't need to go all the way to stainless unless you are planning on soaking the blades in salt water or similar.

-Cliff
 
L6 is a very good steel. Most steels commonly used are, if heat treated properly.

As to the heat treat, I personally would not have sold that knife. I would have re-heat treated because a small portion of the blade did not harden. Check where the hardening line runs off the blade.

As to corrosion. Yes, it will rust. But I am reading Moby Dick right now and realize that for centuries folks used nothing but knives that would rust, even when working in and around salt water, and they worked just fine. The actual edge MAY need a bit more frequent touching up under certain conditions, but the rest of the equation is purely cosmetic.

John
 
John Frankl said:
L6 is a very good steel. Most steels commonly used are, if heat treated properly.

As to the heat treat, I personally would not have sold that knife. I would have re-heat treated because a small portion of the blade did not harden. Check where the hardening line runs off the blade. ...

John
Click to expand...
hmmm, interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. Is it a big deal? What are the drawbacks?
 
It looks like there is a small fraction of an inch near the choil unhardened. How much so depends on how exactly it was hardened. At worst it is annealed and the edge retention will be fairly poor in that fraction of an inch.

-Cliff
 
Cromag,

What Cliff said. It is not really a big performance issue. I was merely commenting that I, on principle, would have done it over before it left my shop.

John
 
L-6 is used on some high end Katana that i have heard of, i would think it would be very dependable and sorta high maintenance.
 
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