Random Thought Thread

Burke said:
lol it just keeps getting worse this week. My wife has had a bunch of (thankfully minor) complications, just the kind of stuff that naturally happens when you’re paralyzed and on a tube feed etc but still ranging from unpleasant to scary and on top of that I have some kind of virus-caused rash that I don’t want to give her so I haven’t been going in to visit the last couple days (and I got it from one of the kids so he’s been miserable and exhausted and I’m miserable and exhausted too but don’t have any kind of time for a break, I’ve been doing things like setting a 20 minute timer on my phone so I can nap during lunch breaks). It’s all stuff we’ll get through and normally wouldn’t be a big deal at all but it still sucks.
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Hang in there, friend. Has to get better at some point.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
Magnacut is good steel

I'm carrying a mass produced mainstream manufacturer pocket knife in Magnacut today.

You would not know that it was a good steel

Good lord people can mess up a good thing
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You’ve posted about doing your own testing to optimize your own heat treat protocols to maximize the performance, but what boggles my mind, is that Larrin published the heat treat protocol from his development of Magnacut. All manufacturers had to do, was just follow that to get pretty good results, and they can still screw it up.

It’s why a lot of knife nuts have advocated going with knives with known performance vs chasing after the ‘latest and greatest super steels’; some manufacturers will simply just offer it, without much care about the heat treat, just for those folks, knowing that many of them will likely never use them for anything more than opening Amazon packages, and just want to tout, “Yeah, the blade on this, is XXXXX”.
 
It's burned. The tip is the worst spot. It is, they burned it.

Here's what probably happened

Blade blanks are waterjet or laser cut. Heat treated. Double disc ground and burned a little bit. Then the bevels are ground and burned a little more. And then somebody finishes wrecking the heat treat while sharpening.

This is the danger of any wear resistant stainless steel with a low tempering temperature. The mass production manufacturing processes are incompatible with a good heat treat And these guys are going to ruin the reputation of this steel because many people's first experience with it won't be a good one.
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
It's burned. The tip is the worst spot. It is, they burned it.

Here's what probably happened

Blade blanks are waterjet or laser cut. Heat treated. Double disc ground and burned a little bit. Then the bevels are ground and burned a little more. And then somebody finishes wrecking the heat treat while sharpening.

This is the danger of any wear resistant stainless steel with a low tempering temperature. The mass production manufacturing processes are incompatible with a good heat treat And these guys are going to ruin the reputation of this steel because many people's first experience with it won't be a good one.
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Sounds like what happened to elmax back in the day

(I like elmax)
 
Nathan the Machinist said:
It's burned. The tip is the worst spot. It is, they burned it.

Here's what probably happened

Blade blanks are waterjet or laser cut. Heat treated. Double disc ground and burned a little bit. Then the bevels are ground and burned a little more. And then somebody finishes wrecking the heat treat while sharpening.

This is the danger of any wear resistant stainless steel with a low tempering temperature. The mass production manufacturing processes are incompatible with a good heat treat And these guys are going to ruin the reputation of this steel because many people's first experience with it won't be a good one.
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Or laser cut and not cleaned up for HAZ prior to HT.

Or heat treated by any one of the commercial heat treaters, following data sheet spec, except right out of austemp and whatever bar pressure they chose to quench at, the blades sat hanging in their bin at room temp for several hours while waiting for whatever minimum wage slug that was supposed to pull them and get them into cold treatment.

Or processed at the wrong austemp because it was cheaper to run them with a pile of other blades at a different temp and call it good.


Or overheated during grinding.

Or overheated during sharpening.

Or… or… or…


It’s why I cringe every time I see someone bark about how the blade tested at ‘x’ RC. Totally unimportant number, unless you know how it got there. And what you chose to do after you got to that.

Just to point something out to everyone, there are no less than ten ways to achieve 62RC on the CPM-Magnacut data sheet. Does anyone think that the results all work out the same in use?


IMG_6994-XL.jpg



Also why I don’t trust anyone but me to perform my heat treat. But maybe I’m being cynical…
 
yoko said:
Sounds like what happened to elmax back in the day

(I like elmax)
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It’s not just Magnacut or Elmax. ALL of these steels need certain things to achieve the desired performance.


Hell, if you really want to experience awful, get yourself a carbon steel blade heat treated in a forge ‘by eye’ by a “master smith”. That can really open one’s eyes.
 
Matthew Gregory said:
It’s not just Magnacut or Elmax. ALL of these steels need certain things to achieve the desired performance.


Hell, if you really want to experience awful, get yourself a carbon steel blade heat treated in a forge ‘by eye’ by a “master smith”. That can really open one’s eyes.
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"Look... I've been doing this a long time. I can tell, by the color".

colorblind-test-image7.jpg

"Whaddya mean, number?"


😅
 
Matthew Gregory said:
It’s not just Magnacut or Elmax. ALL of these steels need certain things to achieve the desired performance.


Hell, if you really want to experience awful, get yourself a carbon steel blade heat treated in a forge ‘by eye’ by a “master smith”. That can really open one’s eyes.
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I'm genuinely curious: is it possible for any master smith to achieve a consistent, proper heat treatment by hand/eye without modern tempering and testing equipment? Or will there always be some level of "it is what it is" without modern equipment? All this is assuming the maker is working on one blade at a time, not cranking out big batches.
 
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