Older Queen Steel stockman with punch---> What steel type?

neilrazer

neilrazer

Joined
Aug 5, 2011
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116
Hi all.

I recently won this Queen Steel stockman at a popular auction site. The knife is great. You can swap the spey for a punch on any stockman as far as I'm concerned. This one has winterbottom covers and measures about 3-[SUP]1[/SUP]/[SUB]2[/SUB]" closed. The blade etch reads "Queen Steel #38" and the tang has the Queen "Q" with "1922" and "1972" on opposing sides of the Q.

Pics from the auction to follow, but my questions first. Does the tang stamp indicate that this knife is from 1972? Also, can any of you tell me what the blade steel would be on this knife. My previous Queen stockman was D2, but it was alot more recent vintage. Did they use the same steel when this one was made? Something else? There is no sign of corrosion that I can see, in case that helps.

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It does look better without so many fingerprints!

Thanks in advance!
 
1972 indicates year of manufacture.
Queen Steel is stainless.

Nice knife. :thumbup:
 
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Likely 440C in those years - so I have been told.
 
Thanks guys! This one will probably be in my pocket until I pick up a sheepsfoot Charlow.
 
440C would be my understanding as well. probably the vast majority of extant queen knives are 440C. covers pretty much from the war (WWII) until the late 80s and early 90s just before D2. I believe Queen kind of made their name with stainless knives and 440C was the majority of it until fairly recently.
 
Queen also did a little bit with 420HC and ATS-34 (1999) in the interim after discontinuing 440C and before D2 (2002). I'm pretty sure there's still a 420HC 'Queen Steel' fixed-blade fillet knife in their current line of knives. As mentioned though, 440C made up the huge majority of the 'Queen Steel' knives, for 5+ decades.

A point of trivia: the springs on the current line of D2 knives are 420HC.


David
 
I have a Queen factory letter from 1976 stating that the steel used in blades was 440C. So 440C would be a safe guess for knives up through that point. However, I do believe that Queen switched from 440C to 440A during the 1979-81 time frame and they have not used 440C since then. They continued with 440A for a number of years then switched to 420HC for standard product then to the current mix of D2, ATS-34, 420 HC, etc.

Personally I wish they would go back to the 440C instead of the D2.
 
"Personally I wish they would go back to the 440C instead of the D2." I agree that 440C is great, better than D2 for me. However, a lot of people like D2, I think they should replace their current stainless with 440C and keep the D2 as well.
 
I have heard that 440C became hard to come by, which is why it went from popular knife steel to practically nonexistent. Can anyone confirm that? Seems odd that a popular and therefore marketable steel would kind of disappear, but you never know i guess. I used to think 440C was hard to sharpen, but that was before Queen and their D2 cold chisels. I would like to try it again but can't find a GEC that I want in it.
 
MarkPinTx said:
I have heard that 440C became hard to come by, which is why it went from popular knife steel to practically nonexistent. Can anyone confirm that? Seems odd that a popular and therefore marketable steel would kind of disappear, but you never know i guess. I used to think 440C was hard to sharpen, but that was before Queen and their D2 cold chisels. I would like to try it again but can't find a GEC that I want in it.
Click to expand...

A lot of manufacturers had difficulties with fine-blanking 440C. Notably, Buck stopped using it primarily for that reason, though they also had complaints about the difficulty of sharpening it back then (early '80s and before), when many were trying to do so with natural stones. The much higher chromium carbide content in 440C was tough on Buck's tooling, making it much more expensive to make knives with it.


David
 
Can surely understand those complaints, but it seems that those objections would have manifested at the outset. Seems like everyone dumped it all at once.
 
MarkPinTx said:
Can surely understand those complaints, but it seems that those objections would have manifested at the outset. Seems like everyone dumped it all at once.
Click to expand...

(Just speculating, but...)

I think Buck sort of made 440C 'popular' with their famous heat treat (Paul Bos), at a time when most stainless cutlery steels were considered inferior to carbon steel. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of other manufacturers, who might've been watching and attempting to duplicate Buck's success with it, bailed out of using it when Buck finally decided to give it up. Either that, or perhaps an improvement in the quality of other steels like 440A/420HC/etc. made the jump to more easily-stamped steels worthwhile. Might've come down to economic considerations, if that particular time period (late '70s/early '80s) brought some increased pressures on manufacturers (I don't know).


David
 
sounds plausible! but I will say that Queen had a longer history with 440C than Buck. But everyone sure seemed to ditch it at about the same time.
 
I am unaware of any shortage of 440C. I would be shocked silly if there were ever a shortage of it. 440C is a standard AISI alloy and can be made by any steel manufacturer. Way too much usage for other non-cutlery applications for it to be in short supply. It's not like 154CM, which is an alloy specific to Crucible. If Crucible runs out of 154CM you will have to change alloys, if only to Hitachi's ATS-34.

When Buck used 440C they did not use fine blanking. They changed alloys several times and arrived at 420HC because they wanted to shift to a fine blanking process in order to reduce costs and improve production rates (OK so "reduce costs" and "improve production rates" are two sides of the same coin. Sue me.) Even 440A does not fine blank well.

Stainless steel requires a quench at negative temperatures (-115°F). This was discovered in Germany in 1939 and patented there. Henkel's Friodur process. Until that freeze quench became common, the properties of stainless were not suitable for good cutlery. Bernard Levine posted that he did not think the freeze quench became common in the US until the '60s. Until that time, the performance of stainless steel sucked little green toads. Once freeze quench became standardized, 440A et. al. worked about as well as carbon steel at holding an edge.

Any alloy which forms carbides (e. g. 440C or D2) is going to require a synthetic stone, (ceramic or diamond) if edges are going to be refined in a reasonable amount of time.
 
Great stuff Frank thanks. I had wondered about a shortage of it since it isn't exactly exotic steel. If friodur was patented in 1939 in the US also, that would explain why it wasn't widely adopted until the 60s (the patent would not have expired until then). I have the understanding that Queen was pretty successful with their Queen Steel knives despite going against the anti stainless conventional wisdom. Wonder if they licenaed or designed around the Henckels patent. Queen Steel I believe was coined to avoid using the dirty word stainless.
 
knarfeng said:
I am unaware of any shortage of 440C. I would be shocked silly if there were ever a shortage of it. 440C is a standard AISI alloy and can be made by any steel manufacturer. Way too much usage for other non-cutlery applications for it to be in short supply. It's not like 154CM, which is an alloy specific to Crucible. If Crucible runs out of 154CM you will have to change alloys, if only to Hitachi's ATS-34.

When Buck used 440C they did not use fine blanking. They changed alloys several times and arrived at 420HC because they wanted to shift to a fine blanking process in order to reduce costs and improve production rates (OK so "reduce costs" and "improve production rates" are two sides of the same coin. Sue me.) Even 440A does not fine blank well.

Stainless steel requires a quench at negative temperatures (-115°F). This was discovered in Germany in 1939 and patented there. Henkel's Friodur process. Until that freeze quench became common, the properties of stainless were not suitable for good cutlery. Bernard Levine posted that he did not think the freeze quench became common in the US until the '60s. Until that time, the performance of stainless steel sucked little green toads. Once freeze quench became standardized, 440A et. al. worked about as well as carbon steel at holding an edge.

Any alloy which forms carbides (e. g. 440C or D2) is going to require a synthetic stone, (ceramic or diamond) if edges are going to be refined in a reasonable amount of time.
Click to expand...

Great post Frank! The depth of your knowledge never ceases to amaze me!:thumbup:
 
Lots of great info! Thanks!

I sharpened the blades with my blue, red, & green DMT stones and it seems like they will hold their edges very well. I usually feel compelled to make frequent touch-ups, but these still have the initial "wow".
 
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