M390 toughness?

DmitryM said:
I broke a tip on my Shirogorov m390 blade. I still do not know what caused it. I just found tip missing. I did not do any heavy duty work with it. I was Slicing some thermofoil on mdf, and I also had it fallen out of my pants pocket later in the day (the knife did not even open.). I picked it up and the tip was missing. I do not feel like buying either shirogorov or m390 ever again. I do not care about their warranty. I believe such tools shall not fail so easily.
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You know you replied to a 4.5 year old thread, right?
 
TigFur said:
I tried to read up on all the different knife forums and reviews about the M390 steel and there seem to be two very different opinions about its toughness.
Some say its not tough at all and they wouldnt use it for bones or hardwood, some compare it to D2 and more and that difference really bothers me.
all agreed on its super edge retention though.
I saw a few videos of M390 knives in action and havent found any failures so far (if you have some id love to see that)

Could it be that the people that claim that this steel isnt tough just looked at the 20% Cr content and made it up? Or is there some truth behind it?

i think it should get cleared up once and for all so that there is at least one thread that explains this steel clearly and completely.


So please post your opinions and experiences here


(btw i wanted to put this in a steel topic forum on here but didnt find any, so i hope this is allright)
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Unfortunately the toughness depend more to the quality of the hardening process than the elements in the steel, the best steel on the world can be destroy by an wrong hardening, is very complicate without tools to evaluate the % of Retained Austenite for this reasons no one are talking about this essential performance of the blades. The correct balance can be obtain with 15% of retained Austenite not too hard not too soft too low the blade come fragile, to high the blade is too elastic. In Europe where the blades by tradition are more thin than in USA this performance is much better under control. A good control of the hardenning can also have another effect who is a better controle of the size of the Secondary Carbide, I am surprise than no one in this forum are looking for theses essential issues.

If you want to use your blades with the assistance of an hammer :=) You can found in Sandvik range an very old grade recently used again by FISCKARS for the blades on garden tools call "CHIPPER STEEL", this grade was used on the past to clean out the tree trunk with blades ables to support heavy shocks thank to an very high ductility. On blades the cut quality of this grade is acceptable but not so good than the steels made for blades.
 
XxMyatical_NinjaxX said:
If an m390 steel full tang knife fall on hard floor will it break? It's heavy
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No of course not. Don't overthink it too much. Sometimes we can fall into thinking steels that aren't tough are about as durable as glass.

Ps, you need to start a new thread if you want to ask more, this one is almost a decade old 👍🏼
 
Haven't hammered my Spyderco Mule in CPM 20CV (same as M390 really) through moose bones but it's an excellent steel for cutting stuff.
 
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