Mild Steel Knife Performance?

Leaf-springs, like you said, and files seem to come up a lot..
A long time ago, I had Blackie Collins' book. I ordered some good hard high-tech steel (for the times...1972 or so) from a mill in Minnesota, made a Lucite sample and then went to the Carpentry shop where I worked. Managed to knock the teeth off of two different band-saws, and suffered some justified derision at the hands of my carpenter friends. Never tried another knife.
 
G. Scott H. said:
By Bronze Age standards a mild steel blade would be pretty decent. By modern standards not so much. The hardest bronzes of the day were apparently about as hard as modern mild steels. You could always attempt the superquench method to add quite a bit of hardness to the steel, but if you're going to bother with heat treat, why not go with a blade steel in the first place (like the aforementioned 1084)?

Superquench: http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/375478-Super-Quench-formula.

If you want a blade that will cut stuff, but needs almost constant resharpening that will wear it down to a toothpick in no time, then mild steel will suffice. For a knife that will cut stuff with minimal edge maintenance and with much greater longevity, high carbon with a good heat treat is the way to go. :thumbup:

[/armchair metallurgist mode] :D
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The right bronze alloy with a work hardened edge will cut better than a mild steel blade. If you don't believe me try it. Copper, tin, and a hardener like arsenic worked well, but the advantage that steel brought was hardenability.

There is no reason to make a knife out of mild steel, even for practice. Steel is the cheapest part of what we do. Just get over it and spend 20 bucks on a bar of 1084, or 1075 and just start working

-Page
 
Maybe it's just my area, but I can get 10XX from Aldo much cheaper than I can get steel at Home Depot/Menards Etc. I see no use in using low carbon steel, even for practice.
 
Long before I came across this forum and started going through the stickies, I did stock removal on mild steel and non-hardenable stainless, making wallhangers and sword-like-objects, thinking it was all about the design and nothing to do with steel selection (good thing I never tried this with anything galvenized). Once I learned that I had it all wrong, instead of calling it ten years wasted it was ten years of profiling practice before touching a piece of *good* blade steel. The only thing I use mild and 316 stainless for now are the handle/guard fittings. I STILL think mild steel is a good material to start with if a new maker has NO profiling experience, and hopefully won't make my mistake and drag it out for a decade.
 
"There's no reason to make a knife out of mild steel"
Well....
A couple times a year I sigh deeply, light the forge, and make a couple dozen railroad spike knives.
Some of that stuff has a bit of carbon in it, but for all practical porpoises, it might as well be mild.
I quench the blades in Superquench, and sell em all.
The people who buy them are all "O MY GOD DOG, THAT IS THE COOLEST KNIFE I USE IT ALL THE TIME" and all I can say is, I'm so glad it works for you.
Bless their hearts, it makes em happy.
 
element, do you tell them that it's not good steel? I'd have been pissed if I found out what I bought is no good, even if I didn't use it much. :eek:

Btw, years ago I grabbed my kids and we walked the local track filling a bucket with spikes. I still have it. After I've done some more knives I plan to try making some hawks. :)

When I first got the idea in my head to try my hand at grinding out a blade, I went to the head engineer at the plant and asked for some scrap mild. He gave it to me with the warning that it'd be unhardenable, but I just wanted the practice. Worked for me, although my plunges were laughable, I gained some experience.

I say go for it if you get the steel free.
 
I've used mild steel when I was trying to develop a type of keychain knife back in college-for one reason is that it was the only steel the college had besides nonferrous alloys. I case hardened it, but found it more useful as a scribe then a knife because I either could sharpen it before the heat treatment-in which case, the edge would get ruined..or sharpen it after in which case the hardened layer would be redundant.
 
My first was from a used circular saw blade. It hardened all right. Mystery steel but musta had some carbon. Beats mild steel.
 
Better than a chipped rock! ;) (In the interest of full disclosure, I'm mostly using CPM-154, Elmax and CPM-3V these days... when I slip over to the Dark Side I stick with stuff like 1084, O1 and 52100.) Geometry cuts, there's no denying that. You could sharpen a bar of aluminum and cut stuff with it... just not for very long.

The Mastiff said:
It sure won't harden by heat treating. :)
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Sure it will, but only to about 45Rc max, as mentioned earlier.

elementfe said:
A couple times a year I sigh deeply, light the forge, and make a couple dozen railroad spike knives.
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Exactly like you're saying, I know another blacksmith who makes lots of railroad spike knives with the same method. He doesn't claim they hold an edge very long, but they look neat and he can crank 'em out and sell 'em pretty cheap. They're basically a novelty item, like "prairie diamond" rings made from horseshoe nails.
 
james terrio said:
Sure it will, but only to about 45Rc max, as mentioned earlier.



Exactly like you're saying, I know another blacksmith who makes lots of railroad spike knives with the same method. He doesn't claim they hold an edge very long, but they look neat and he can crank 'em out and sell 'em pretty cheap. They're basically a novelty item, like "prairie diamond" rings made from horseshoe nails.
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45Rc is about as hard as the popular titanium bladed knives. :p

Your take on the spike knives puts it into better perspective. Hope my earlier question didn't come off as rude! :o
 
sunshadow said:
The right bronze alloy with a work hardened edge will cut better than a mild steel blade. If you don't believe me try it. Copper, tin, and a hardener like arsenic worked well, but the advantage that steel brought was hardenability.
-Page
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I don't doubt it. I was just trying to make a general analogy about hardness of materials. Perhaps not the best analogy, but it's what came to mind at the time. :o:thumbup:
 
My first knife was mild steel. I spent hours hand polishing it. Attempted my own heat treat. Hours and hours of work to make the thing perfect. It looked pretty nice. And I got it razor sharp.

BUT I tried to whittle some wood with it to try it out. After a few strokes the edge was gone, and then I dropped it by accident the tip broke and the edge folded like butter. In my opinion it was great to learn to grind on. But in the end I wasted a lot of time on a tool that couldn't even do it's job that it was created to do. I wish I had started with just 1084 from the beginning.
Just my 2 cents.
 
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