Question or mete

Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith

Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith

ilmarinen - MODERATOR
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Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
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At Bill's auction I noticed he had a lot of 9260 steel (I bought about 20# of it).It is a silicon-manganese steel which seems to have a high tensile and yield strength.Jay Hendrickson said that Bill used it and W-2 a lot.I haven't noticed anyone else using it. Is there any reason you know that it would not be a good blade steel?
Stacy
 
The 92xx series is a spring steel and scrap auto springs might be 5160 or sometimes 9260. Similar in properties , similar in heat treating and it has been used for blades .Might be more common in Europe. Years back when I was a fencer I analysed some fencing blades -they were 9255 ! As a silicon steel they decarburize more readily than other steels ,as do the S5 and S7 tool steels.Use it !!
 
S5 (9260 with a little alloy) can get 58-60 Rc and still have something like 138 ft. lbs. in the Charpy-C toughness test. S7 gets only around 125 ft. lbs. at 57 Rc, and 3V gets 85 at 58 Rc. It's probably the toughest high hardness steel around. It probably has very few if any carbides, so edge retention won't be that great, but at 60 Rc it shouldn't be too bad. If a compromise of less toughness for more wear resistance is desired after using 9260, then move to 5160 (this is taken from Wayne Goddard's opinion stated in his books and I don't really have wear resistance data comparing the two). It should be relatively easy to forge. There might be better heat treating information, but here's the Crucible data for S5: http://www.crucibleservice.com/eselector/prodbyapp/tooldie/labelle.html I'd follow the heat treatment for S5 that gets the 58-60 Rc, so temper at 400F. Hopefully the little bit of alloy in S5 doesn't change it too much from 9260. I looked at the 9260 data in the ASM Heat Treater's guide and couldn't really tell if there were any differences, the tempering graph was kind of useless.
 
Thanks.guys. I had checked the data guides and only found spring references. The HT and temper was for springs, and much higher than I would use for blades. I figured that it should work like 5160 ,but did not recall anyone posting a knife made from it. I think it would make a good trainer steel for those who are trying forging out.The toughness seems really high,once hardened.
Thanks again.
Stacy
 
I haven't tried it for knives, but I have several 3/4" round bars that I make chisels, punches, and drifts from. nice steel for those.
 
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