Rug vs Rex 45 & S110V

J

John_0917

Joined
Apr 15, 2014
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I learned first hand today just how bad heavy rugs/carpet are even for high performance steel. My dog got sick recently and ass vomited on a 12x10 household rug (low pile, Target brand), there was no hope of saving it and it needed to be cut down so the garbage men would take it. Obviously the logical choice was to use a Spyderco.

I carry my P3 lightweight the most and decided that would be the primary knife, S110V Manix if needed something different and then either a D2 Steel Will or something similar, didn’t expect to need anything beyond the Rex45 really...boy was I wrong!

After cutting the 10x12 rug into basically 3 10’ parts and then those into halves I had totally dulled the Rex45 from hair shaving to unable to open an envelope without tearing, the S110V went from paper slicing to barely able to cut paper. The edges on both were severely scratched too...I am absolutely amazed just how bad carpeting is on steel. So, if you have to do something similar, leave the HSS (aside from Maxamet) out of it and go high vanadium for sure, I would imagine ZDP and M4 wouldn’t fare well either.

Now I have some resharpening to do !
 
Last time I did a similar job with my griptilian 154cm. The knife became quite dull after the cut. But it’s very easy to bring the sharpness back with dozen of strop on a ceramic rod.
 
Have these knives been sharpened before?

In my experience most knives need at least one good sharpening before you see the steel perform as expected.
Some need more than one.
 
I'm not too sure any steel would fare too well against carpet. A utility knife with disposable blades seems like the way to go!
 
willc said:
Have these knives been sharpened before?

In my experience most knives need at least one good sharpening before you see the steel perform as expected.
Some need more than one.
Click to expand...
Yea they’re both pretty well used, I agree that most edges need to be sharpened several times to get to the “good” steel, it’s like the crust on brownies.
 
John_0917 said:
The edges on both were severely scratched too...I am absolutely amazed just how bad carpeting is on steel. So, if you have to do something similar, leave the HSS (aside from Maxamet) out of it and go high vanadium for sure,
Click to expand...

I've had similar, unsatisfactory results cutting a rubber floor mat with Maxamet. The lesson I learned was that "super steel" means it will hold an edge longer than "boring steel" when performing the same cutting tasks. It doesn't mean you can use the knife doing super stupid tasks. If you abuse it, it will show abuse. But if you never push the envelope, you never learn where that edge lies.
 
RustyIron said:
I've had similar, unsatisfactory results cutting a rubber floor mat with Maxamet. The lesson I learned was that "super steel" means it will hold an edge longer than "boring steel" when performing the same cutting tasks. It doesn't mean you can use the knife doing super stupid tasks. If you abuse it, it will show abuse. But if you never push the envelope, you never learn where that edge lies.
Click to expand...
It’s pretty incredible that steels that are literally used to cut other steels, can stay harder than most metals even when red hot, can struggle with cutting a common household material. Sure enough though, seems like it has the bad combo of abrasive material with impurities (dirt/sand), I would imagine that rubber mat you mention did too.

Some of the SxxV steels were actually designed for use in plastic and rubber manufacturing, because of the highly corrosive chemicals and abrasive mixtures.
 
A few years back I was removing carpet from a room in my house and my Manix 2 S110v to cut it into smaller pieces.

I had the same results. Ended up breaking the tip and dulling the blade. I sent it to someone to reprofile and sharpen.

Lesson learned - use a utility knife for carpet.
 
Years back at work, we used rolls of some type of blue fiberglass material for filters that had to be cut to size. It was about 1/2 inch thick and not very dense, you could almost see through it.
A razor knife blade was good for about 2ft before it was too dull to cut anything, my case stockman about the same.
My M2 hss blade was good for about 10ft. So the M2 blade would cut about 5x as much as the razor or case before it was in the same shape.
I ended up using scissors, which did a lot better, but still had to be sharpened occasionally.
 
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