Cliff Stamp
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What are you cutting, and what type of finish are you using?
-Cliff
-Cliff
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Rehashing Joe Talmadge's Steel Info
- Thread starter omniphile
- Start date
To sharpen, I'll be using an EdgePro, up through their 600 grit (extra fine) stone, possibly polishing with .3 AO PSA tapes on the EdgePro. Likely, doing touch-ups with a SharpMaker followed by leather strop (leather mounted on wood) loaded with CrO (CrO bar, not liquid).
Stuff that I'm cutting - Cardboard (less than 10 pieces a week), Apples for lunch, opening letters (had to throw that in), typical non-industrial non-skinning non-outdoorsey stuff.
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No TedGamble! Don't do it!
I've sharpened VG-10 down to about 20 inclusive degrees (more like 22) and the edge chipped out cutting a plastic soda bottle. It was very sharp, but short lived.
I've sharpened VG-10 down to about 20 inclusive degrees (more like 22) and the edge chipped out cutting a plastic soda bottle. It was very sharp, but short lived.
The main bevels of all my folder blades are ground at 10 degrees per side.
Thom is right - they'll all chip or roll to some extent when cutting hardwoods or plastic with strong pressure - if the edge is left at 20 degrees included.
What works for me is to develop a larger-angle micro-bevel to strengthen the edge. A micro-bevel of 15 degrees per side is usually sufficient to stabilize the edge for a decent steel (D2, S30V, VG-10, ATS-34, etc.).
The micro-bevel surface is so thin that it's difficult to perceive any loss of slicing efficiency due to the micro-bevel - imperceptible for simple newprint-slicing.
And touch-up resharpening effort is trivial - since your only sharpening the very narrow micro-bevels. We're talking 2 or 3 passes per bevel with a hand-held fine (white side) Spyderco DoubleStuff to restore an edge.
Hope this helps!
Thom is right - they'll all chip or roll to some extent when cutting hardwoods or plastic with strong pressure - if the edge is left at 20 degrees included.
What works for me is to develop a larger-angle micro-bevel to strengthen the edge. A micro-bevel of 15 degrees per side is usually sufficient to stabilize the edge for a decent steel (D2, S30V, VG-10, ATS-34, etc.).
The micro-bevel surface is so thin that it's difficult to perceive any loss of slicing efficiency due to the micro-bevel - imperceptible for simple newprint-slicing.
And touch-up resharpening effort is trivial - since your only sharpening the very narrow micro-bevels. We're talking 2 or 3 passes per bevel with a hand-held fine (white side) Spyderco DoubleStuff to restore an edge.
Hope this helps!
Cliff Stamp
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thombrogan said:
What were the size of the chips, visible by eye? Was this cutting through the sides or the bottom?
TedGamble said:
For this type of edge you don't really want high carbide steels, especially the coarse ones. If you are going custom then look for either a high speed stainless or the low carbide versions like 12C27 or 13C26/AEB-L. D2 is definately out with how most heat treat it which is to soak at 1850. The grain size can be refined significantly by hotter heats up to a minimum at about 1900F. But as you push more of the carbide into solution you start to lose the wear resistance of D2 and then you raise the question of why did you pick that really difficult to grind steel in the first place.
I don't in general rate 10 degrees as very acute for such uses, it is generally beyond metal cutting but both VG-10 and S30V will work fine there for lighter work. In general I would recommend a micro-bevel simply for ease of sharpening. Do the shaping at 10 and then sharpen at say 12 which radically decreases honing time and will increase strength dramatically with little effect on cutting ability. Recut the primary at ten periodically as necessary. This is with a 10 degree primary and 15 degree secondary (0.1-0.2 mm wide) :
Edge was blunted, but the secondary bevel was still present under magnification so no signficant damage. I was more irritated than the knife because there was an ant's nest under the sod which didn't take kindly to me removing their roof.
-Cliff
Omniphile I am sure you are a really good guy and you mean well and you are searching for answers like the rest of us but I beg to differ with you vehemently on one claim you made on that chart on the first post.
ON that chart you have S60V which is the same steel as 440V and it is rated "FAIRLY EASY" to sharpen. That is about like saying that Castor Oil tastes good and that Sarah Brady is a friend of gun owners
.
Buddy I am here to tell you first hand with hands on experience and by doing several blades made from that steel ( 440V~~S60V) and I am here to tell you that there is nothing easy about sharpening 440V. It is one of the 3 hardest blade steels to sharpen that I have ever encountered. I have at least 3 good knife afficionado friends that ridgidly agree with me on that one. With all due respect Sir I don't know how you came up with that information but 440V is nothing short of pure punishment
to sharpen. Go get any Spyderco model made with that blade steel and try it yourself. I was told by one of Crucible's representatives that because of the super high carbon content and significantly high vanadium percentage that they even admit it is one of the meanest blade steels to sharpen. Sorry guy 
but I have to respectfully disagree with that one.
ON that chart you have S60V which is the same steel as 440V and it is rated "FAIRLY EASY" to sharpen. That is about like saying that Castor Oil tastes good and that Sarah Brady is a friend of gun owners
. Buddy I am here to tell you first hand with hands on experience and by doing several blades made from that steel ( 440V~~S60V) and I am here to tell you that there is nothing easy about sharpening 440V. It is one of the 3 hardest blade steels to sharpen that I have ever encountered. I have at least 3 good knife afficionado friends that ridgidly agree with me on that one. With all due respect Sir I don't know how you came up with that information but 440V is nothing short of pure punishment
to sharpen. Go get any Spyderco model made with that blade steel and try it yourself. I was told by one of Crucible's representatives that because of the super high carbon content and significantly high vanadium percentage that they even admit it is one of the meanest blade steels to sharpen. Sorry guy but I have to respectfully disagree with that one.- Joined
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Cliff Stamp said:
Very visible. It was a ridgeline of chips on a rolled edge. Very disgusting. Was cutting through the sides so it was very unexpected.
Cliff Stamp
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That's pretty low performance indeed. I could see some damage to be expected on the heavy cuts through the end of the bottle if it twisted as the force there gets high.
-Cliff
-Cliff
JD Spydo:
Just a few quick comments. I keep getting told I'm not a nice guy - so I'm sorry I misled you. Secondly, I've never ever owned a knife made out of S60V so I was only working on my (incorrect) interpretation of what some other kind people had posted. But, this is great info that I'll store in the memory banks. Thank you.
Cheers
Phillip
Just a few quick comments. I keep getting told I'm not a nice guy - so I'm sorry I misled you. Secondly, I've never ever owned a knife made out of S60V so I was only working on my (incorrect) interpretation of what some other kind people had posted. But, this is great info that I'll store in the memory banks. Thank you.
Cheers
Phillip
Cliff Stamp
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JD Spydo said:
He isn't claiming as much as attempting to sort the existing information. The problem is that most relative performance statements are not made with the same benchmarks. Note the corrosion list is all mixed up, 440 isn't more corrosion resistant than 440A.
-Cliff
I have thought about this a few times and I would like to see something that would give you a rough guide as to what grit to stop at for various materials to maximise their cutting ability vs longevity. I know the variables are incredible but there must be a rough guide.
Cliff Stamp
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They generally are the same thing, with better initial cutting ability you get better edge retention and I have found that this is no lower limit. Even 80/100 grit AO belts work very well as do 90 grit AO benchstons and x-coarse DMT pads. A difficult question to answer is which grit to use for a knife which does both slice/push cutting and how much edge retention/cutting ability do you lose in one area to gain it in another. I will be putting up a graph of ZDP-189/VG-10 at 1200 DMT which shows the striking difference vs 600 DMT on slicing cardboard shortly.
-Cliff
-Cliff
Omniphile,
Don't get discouraged and give up! Thanks for starting this thread, it's very interesting. Even if the task seems impossible, it's a fun discussion! Any opinion seems to need about four qualifiers when talking about a steel, geometry, heat treat, etc...
Well, Thom, thank you very much! Last night I finally got the time to take my VG10 Calypso Jr. down to the black mark on my Edgepro, which is 15 deg (30 included). I put a 17 (or so) microbevel on it for good measure. I thought I had a real slick cutting machine, it would *snick* through envelopes like nobody's business! Then you started talking about damage. I thought, "Hah"! So I march out to my garage, where I had a goodly stack of cardboard from my Costco run today. I slice about 20 feet or so, real fast. Got the blade good and hot. Started seeing ripples on the edge - getting wavy. Now I'm thinking - *crap*. So I go on to my other "standard" test - cutting a fuzz stick out of a piece of pitch pine from Walmart. I don't get out into the woods too much these days... This will sound familiar to Cliff. So I start cutting the fuzz stick, using a scooping cut, kind of like scooping ice cream away from me. Chips. Quite visible, but not as bad as the damage I inflicted on my Queen 4180 in D2. Still, I stopped a lot sooner than I did with my Queen, as I knew what would happen next. The chips go past the microbevel up into the secondary bevel.
The good news is that the damage is removed in 5 minutes due to the thin primary grind. The bad news is that I want to go thinner. Much thinner. I find I'm no longer satisfied with 20 deg inclusive bevels. The problem is, you gotta have steel strong enough to be thin, and from what I read from one of Joe's posts in another thread, that means high hardness - generally. Or is it the other way - steel's gotta be hard in order to be strong enough to support a thin edge.
I'm finding my list of acceptable steels growing smaller by leaps and bounds. Back to my hacksaw blade....
Don't get discouraged and give up! Thanks for starting this thread, it's very interesting. Even if the task seems impossible, it's a fun discussion! Any opinion seems to need about four qualifiers when talking about a steel, geometry, heat treat, etc...
Well, Thom, thank you very much! Last night I finally got the time to take my VG10 Calypso Jr. down to the black mark on my Edgepro, which is 15 deg (30 included). I put a 17 (or so) microbevel on it for good measure. I thought I had a real slick cutting machine, it would *snick* through envelopes like nobody's business! Then you started talking about damage. I thought, "Hah"! So I march out to my garage, where I had a goodly stack of cardboard from my Costco run today. I slice about 20 feet or so, real fast. Got the blade good and hot. Started seeing ripples on the edge - getting wavy. Now I'm thinking - *crap*. So I go on to my other "standard" test - cutting a fuzz stick out of a piece of pitch pine from Walmart. I don't get out into the woods too much these days... This will sound familiar to Cliff. So I start cutting the fuzz stick, using a scooping cut, kind of like scooping ice cream away from me. Chips. Quite visible, but not as bad as the damage I inflicted on my Queen 4180 in D2. Still, I stopped a lot sooner than I did with my Queen, as I knew what would happen next. The chips go past the microbevel up into the secondary bevel.
The good news is that the damage is removed in 5 minutes due to the thin primary grind. The bad news is that I want to go thinner. Much thinner. I find I'm no longer satisfied with 20 deg inclusive bevels. The problem is, you gotta have steel strong enough to be thin, and from what I read from one of Joe's posts in another thread, that means high hardness - generally. Or is it the other way - steel's gotta be hard in order to be strong enough to support a thin edge.
I'm finding my list of acceptable steels growing smaller by leaps and bounds. Back to my hacksaw blade....
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Well Sodak, get your HF 1" x 30" grinder; one of your 1" x 0.05" x 12-14" hacksaw blades, a few 80x AO belts (one for making a knife blank; one for shaping the bevel), a dust mask and safety glasses, and a bowl of water. One of my Sculpey-handled knives lost its handle, but the blade is still sharp. The 80x belts will do it all, but the steel will get hot as you press on.
Cliff Stamp
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sodak said:
The edge visibly deformed cutting cardboard at 15 degrees *per side*?
How large? Visble is bad enough, I would not even tolerate anything signficant to feel at that angle, nor even much less, unless there were heavy knots and the cuts were sloppy, and even then the angle has to be minimum of about 10 and the chips should be barely visible at most.
-Cliff
Yes, the after cutting the cardboard, you could see light reflecting in a bright-dark pattern, along the length of edge that I was cutting on, say an inch or so. I didn't measure the chips, but if the microbevel was 0.1 to 02. mm, then the chips would have been about that. They came out pretty quickly with a 600 DMT, but you can still feel and see them a little. They'll come out in the next couple of sharpenings. I wish I had a camera, but my wife has it and she's out of the country. I'll snap a couple of pics in a couple of weeks when she gets back.
Cliff Stamp
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How many times was the knife sharpened before the cardboard use?
-Cliff
-Cliff
It was sharpened twice on ceramic rods at the factory bevel, then I re-profiled it on my edgepro, so that would be 3 times total. If you would like, shoot me an email with your address and I'll send this one and the D2 blade to you if you would like to take a look at them in your *copious* spare time....
On an aside note (then I promise I'll quit hijacking this thread) I took a small O1 Nessmuk style blade on a hike in the woods with my kids today. I had re-profiled it from a convex edge to about 20 deg per side. Pretty thick, but it's my first O1 knife, so I wanted to be safe for a while before I took it down. Anyway, as luck would have it, out in the middle of nowhere, one has to go to the bathroom. No bathroom. So I'm starting to sharpen a digging stick, then they start doing the "potty dance". Time is limited, so I grit my teeth and dug the cat hole with my blade. It was fairly hard soil, plenty of rock impacts. I was very surprised to find only 1 very small chip that you could barely see, more of an impact indent, and of course general dulling, especially at the tip. All in all, very solid and impressive performance, better than my Becker CU/7, which had been the previous "go to" knife for cat holes. And the Becker's performance was pretty good also.
I think the first order of business at the beginning of the hike from now on will be making and carrying a digging stick before the need arises....
On an aside note (then I promise I'll quit hijacking this thread) I took a small O1 Nessmuk style blade on a hike in the woods with my kids today. I had re-profiled it from a convex edge to about 20 deg per side. Pretty thick, but it's my first O1 knife, so I wanted to be safe for a while before I took it down. Anyway, as luck would have it, out in the middle of nowhere, one has to go to the bathroom. No bathroom. So I'm starting to sharpen a digging stick, then they start doing the "potty dance". Time is limited, so I grit my teeth and dug the cat hole with my blade. It was fairly hard soil, plenty of rock impacts. I was very surprised to find only 1 very small chip that you could barely see, more of an impact indent, and of course general dulling, especially at the tip. All in all, very solid and impressive performance, better than my Becker CU/7, which had been the previous "go to" knife for cat holes. And the Becker's performance was pretty good also.
I think the first order of business at the beginning of the hike from now on will be making and carrying a digging stick before the need arises....
Cliff Stamp
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I had some similar issues with a Temperance (wood chopping not cardboard cutting) early on which went away, or at least was vastly reduced with subsequent sharpenings. It is pretty stable now. I am updating the review now as I am using it and some other small blades to buck up some really small woods (1-2") which was scrubbed off a building lot. We should trade, I'll send you mine which work well and you send me yours that you are having problems with.
-Cliff
-Cliff