School me on steel

S

shmoe

Joined
Apr 10, 2013
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The thread about preference of steels (should becker choose a different one) got me thinking.......

One of the things I liked about my BK2 when I bought it was the 1090 steel (I had read that it was a 'good' steel). The blade has been performing amazingly well in my 'wilderness survival' tests...however I'm wondering how much of that is the steel, and how much of that is the heat treatment?

Now that i'm a member of these forums I've been reading about knives much more...and it seems to me that heat treatment, and the hardness obtained from it has a lot more to do with edge retention, toughness, and chipping than the actual steel used. With that said, is the 1090 steel used on Beckers more/less superior than say a 440a or 420HC blade from Buck (just as an example), or a s30v, or 154cm steel from another company (lets just say benchmade as an example) assuming the steel of all blades are hardened to the same rockwell? I know i'm comparing carbon steel to some stainless varieties, but if heat treatment is the factor, it shouldn't matter. Is the heat treat what makes a becker so great, or is it the steel?
 
The Buck 420HC (BOS heat treated) is the best 420HC in the knife industry. I took my TOPS/BUCK CSAR-T 690 Fixed Knife (420HC BOS) and Gerber LMF II Fixed Knife - Coyote Brown (420HC Stainless Steel) to outdoor school and let the kids baton wood with them and they both held up great. Both have only one issue....to short:D
 
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Literally the only thing 1095 has going for it over the steels listed is that it is very easy to field sharpen, well and its cheap. When I say cheap I dont mean bad I mean inexpensive.420HC, 440C, S30V, and 154CM when properly heat treated will hold an edge longer and have more lateral strength than 1095, that being said my favorite knives are 1095 its a work horse of a steel that I can sharpen on a rock if need be.

Of the stainless steels listed I like 440C the best for a rather odd reason, its a lot like 1095 :)
 
I think there's a lot of prejudice against stainless steel around here& I include myself in that. I have become so accustomed to the belief that "stainless steel will chip under hard use" that I won't even consider it for larger knives.
I'm sure that the heat treat has A LOT to do with end user performance but each steel has its own inherent molecular properties that make it suitable for a specific type of use. I don't think you could make a great chopper out of 440A no matter what heat treat was used.
Generally I prefer carbon steel because it has a reputation for edge rolling rather than chipping when it fails. I know that all blades will fail under the right circumstances but when the edge fails it's much much easier to sharpen a rolled edge back to a satisfactory level than a chipped edge.
YMMV...
 
rkmoore said:
I think there's a lot of prejudice against stainless steel around here& I include myself in that. I have become so accustomed to the belief that "stainless steel will chip under hard use" that I won't even consider it for larger knives.
I'm sure that the heat treat has A LOT to do with end user performance but each steel has its own inherent molecular properties that make it suitable for a specific type of use. I don't think you could make a great chopper out of 440A no matter what heat treat was used.
Generally I prefer carbon steel because it has a reputation for edge rolling rather than chipping when it fails. I know that all blades will fail under the right circumstances but when the edge fails it's much much easier to sharpen a rolled edge back to a satisfactory level than a chipped edge.
YMMV...
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Honestly the edge rolling vs chipping has a lot to do with the final hrc of the blade. Stainless is often ht to a higher hardness vs carbon. This is from my personal experience and has no scientic backup to it.
 
modern steels, tools steels and otherwise, rock compared to 30 and 50 years ago.

buy quality, and you're basically not going to care. no reasonably human being can reasonably exploit the minimal differences until you have a SPECIAL and dire need (as with say, highly corrosive environment)...

oh hey, KaBar fits that bill. Beckers as a sub-set === good :D
 
Galeocerdoshark said:
Thanks, very interesting read!

As with the OP, I would also be interested in how 1095CV compares to stainless in some popular models with regards to some characteristics (with edge retention as the most interesting characteristic to me, as is ease of sharpening and the like).
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Bookmarked that one some time ago. I like the part where Tooj chimes in. The man knows his stuff.
 
PatrickKnight said:
Literally the only thing 1095 has going for it over the steels listed is that it is very easy to field sharpen, well and its cheap. When I say cheap I dont mean bad I mean inexpensive.420HC, 440C, S30V, and 154CM when properly heat treated will hold an edge longer and have more lateral strength than 1095, that being said my favorite knives are 1095 its a work horse of a steel that I can sharpen on a rock if need be.

Of the stainless steels listed I like 440C the best for a rather odd reason, its a lot like 1095 :)
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I thought 1095 is used for plows, harrows, and disks - farm machinery that encounters rocks and tree roots in forceful ways.

Could you please refer us to testing that shows 440C, 420HC, or 154Cm have greater "lateral strength." I Googled but came up empty.


Steel is a raw material, like flour is for baking. If the maker is a good "cook," you get great results FOR THE INTENDED USE, but the brand of flour is no guarantee of quality. [TYVM daizee]
 
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Thomas Linton said:
1095 is used for plows, harrows, and disks - farm machinery that encounters rocks and tree roots in forceful ways. Could you please refer us to testing that shows 440C, 420HC, or 154Cm have greater "lateral strength."

Steel is a raw material, like flour is for baking. If the maker is a good "cook," you get great results, but the brand of flour is no guarantee of quality.
Click to expand...

I don't know on the knife side of things, but I know in the manufacture of other steel products, you can certainly get a so-called 'grain' to your steel. This is one of the big reasons people seem to hate MIM (metal injection molding) manufactured gun parts - they seem to get a grainy internal structure that tends to break. I've also seen this grainy structure inside machinery gears that have broken. I wonder if this 'grain' differs much between the different alloys of steel and is the underlying cause of failure in stress and shock loading... or if that grain is just a by-product of the manufacturing process. If it is in fact caused by the alloy used, that could be part of what causes one alloy to have greater lateral strength than another (my hypothesis anyway). OOOOOOOOOR its the heat treat again LOL

Anyone care to chime in on this? I do think lateral stregth is important on a knife because i've broken more than one tip and blade (on knives much thinner than my BK2) from lateral forces that I put on the knife while trying to cut/twist/pry my way through something.
 
Areas of steel that fail suddenly leave behind "frosted" or "grainy" surfaces. I had to look at a number of fractographs once in connection with a supposed defect in a motor vehicle part, and that was the explanation of the A.S.M. engineer for what I was seeing.
 
shmoe said:
Anyone care to chime in on this? I do think lateral stregth is important on a knife because i've broken more than one tip and blade (on knives much thinner than my BK2) from lateral forces that I put on the knife while trying to cut/twist/pry my way through something.
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use a pry bar for prying. It will be tempered for toughness over hardness. The two are usually a trade off. Knives have to be hard to cut through material, which makes them generally more brittle.

The heat-treat is the way to optimize the particular steel for a particular (range) of uses. The chemistry of the material determines the range of properties that can be extracted with heat treatments, and the particular type of heat treatment that must be performed.
 
Thomas Linton said:
I thought 1095 is used for plows, harrows, and disks - farm machinery that encounters rocks and tree roots in forceful ways.

Could you please refer us to testing that shows 440C, 420HC, or 154Cm have greater "lateral strength." I Googled but came up empty.


Steel is a raw material, like flour is for baking. If the maker is a good "cook," you get great results FOR THE INTENDED USE, but the brand of flour is no guarantee of quality. [TYVM daizee]
Click to expand...

I will do my best to see if I can dig up some charts with at least one of these steels in it, I am pretty sure I still have one saved with 440C. One thing a lot of people forget about 1095 is that it is a spring steel so it has a great deal of flex to it. This can give a false idea of the lateral strength. Also the parts you mentioned are not nearly as hard as a 1095 knife would be which gives them even more flex. While I am not in anyway saying 1095 is a bad steel far from it in fact there are steels that can out do it in just about every way.
 
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