Living with S90V

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Peakbagger46

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I just got my first “super steel”, a 940-1 in S90V and I’m a bit intimidated by what I’ve heard.I’ve gotten good at maintaining my knives in S30V and D2 using my ceramic sticks. If I don’t let the S90V go dull and touch up frequently, will this setup work?

The grind on this knife appears well done and around 20 degrees (although I have no way to measure that). Here’s a picture of my Lanskey sticks:

F93F3A18-C601-4168-B6F5-A575FF766981_zpsuu02yo7g.jpg
 
Crock sticks will work fine, used as you described. I have a couple blades in S90V and they respond well to my Lansky sticks.

edit: Since you don't know the exact bevel angles, you can color the bevels with a Sharpie, then give the blade a few swipes on the sticks. If the marker comes off at the apex, you're good. If it comes off higher up on the bevels, you can switch to the 25* slots.
 
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Yeah, you'll be fine. S90V is not impossible to maintain by any means. Just be patient when touching it up, it'll take a bit longer than S30 or D2, but it will still get there. And it likes a toothy edge, so the more coarse ceramic rods you have will probably get you the best results.
 
Thanks guys. Just got this blade yesterday, so I haven’t cut a lot with it yet. I think I see what you mean by liking a toothy edge. It seems to cut kind of aggressively, reminds me of my 1095 carbon hunting blade (which I love).
 
Peakbagger46 said:
Thanks guys. Just got this blade yesterday, so I haven’t cut a lot with it yet. I think I see what you mean by liking a toothy edge. It seems to cut kind of aggressively, reminds me of my 1095 carbon hunting blade (which I love).
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Just be sure to keep it touched up for the love of god! You do not want to have to try to do a serious resharpening job with those croc sticks.
 
Peakbagger46 said:
will this setup work?
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Having wasted a good deal of time with sharpening high vanadium S__V alloys on several knives, with stones other than diamond, to a very high degree of sharpness only to have the edges not live up to their full potential (not hold a decent edge for very long) I have this to say :

Diamonds are a guy's best friend. ;)
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Honestly, I was surprised at how easy S90V was to sharpen, especially compared to S30V and S110V. It was marginally worse than S30V, but miles away from S110V. I expected it to be an absolute bear to sharpen, but it was just normal super steel effort and time required.

That said, I would strongly suggest diamonds for any steel above VG-10/N690. The proper super steels, like S30V and up, are time consuming even with diamonds to sharpen and reprofile, I can't imagine how unbearable doing that with ceramic would be.
 
Wowbagger said:
Having wasted a good deal of time with sharpening high vanadium S__V alloys on several knives, with stones other than diamond, to a very high degree of sharpness only to have the edges not live up to their full potential (not hold a decent edge for very long) I have this to say :

Diamonds are a guy's best friend. ;)
View attachment 896315
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Was sharpening arduous enough to make the thumb studs fall off?
 
so far i've reprofile & sharpened manix s90v and with diamond stone + strop it's not that hard
after reprofile it stays sharp quite a while and need only some stropping
 
dkb45 said:
Honestly, I was surprised at how easy S90V was to sharpen, especially compared to S30V and S110V. It was marginally worse than S30V, but miles away from S110V.
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This is my experience as well. If you can do S30V, you should be fine with S90V. The difference in factory edges may make a bigger difference than the difference in steals for maintaining the edge, atleast initially.
 
Just to echo some of the above, do yourself a favor and get setup with diamonds if and when full sharpening is needed. There was a very enlightening thread on this a while back where it was stated “S30V and above Vanadium levels” need diamonds to see the full potential of the steel.

I hated S90V using the Sharpmaker rods, even starting with the coarse diamonds. Finishing on the ceramics not only was time consuming, it never showed me the true potential of the steel. Once I did I full sharpening all the way thru fine diamonds...night and day difference on edge retention.
 
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