Cliff Stamp
BANNED
- Joined
- Oct 5, 1998
- Messages
- 17,562
Bobby said:
I am not a Metallurgist, my degrees are in Molecular Physics, in particular the Condensed Matter Physics of the effect of high pressures (1000x atmosphere) on the radiation interaction of macro-molecular groups. (doesn't that sound much more impressive - it is actually a lot simpler than it sounds). Anyway my background gave me the necessary fundamentals to readily studiy metallurgy as it applied solid state physics which is my field, so I understood the references to crystal structure, slip planes and so on. However I would like to clearify you don't need this background to understand it very well in an applied sense, if you want an extreme example of this, check out the postings by Alvin Johnson on rec.knives, he is completely self-taught with I think no secondary traning in any similar field that I am aware of, and he has easily a knowledge of applied metallurgy to knife making that equals the best I have seen (exceeds most including mine), and I have talked to a *lot* of people.
Anyway specific to S30V, to clear up a few misconseptions and really poorly paraphrased comments. No one was arguing the steel was "junk" in Reeves blades because it was softer than in various customs. Well you can probably find that sort of comment if you search around, but it was not in the discussions in the forums here. What was argued was quite simply that when you lower hardness the blade gets softer (this is kind of obvious I would assume as it is what hardness means). When a blade gets softer there are direct and immediate consequences to performance independent of the other properties of the steel. As for what these properties are, I have stated them clearly before, and gave references to many such comparisons by knifemakers (Goddard, Wilson, Johnson, etc.) who showed significant performance differences even with the hardness difference was ~one HRC point. With Reeves knives in the beginning we were talking about up to a 4 HRC point difference, as origionally they were quoted from the shop foreman as having a lower bound of 57 HRC (post on this forum). With such a large difference the performance issues are night and day, check out a recent comparison by Alvin Johnson comparing two 1095 blades of significant different hardness on rec.knives.
If you want to discuss this matter in more detail with me you can ask email, or outside the Reeve Form in any public forum where I read and post. I will not be posting here after this post (or even reading it because it is then pointless) because of a conversation I had with Reeve on last Monday, the end result of which was that I agreed not to post on his forum and he agreed to make a post here explaining why I would not so people would not ask me questions or wonder why I was ignoring relevant posts . He has not chosen to do so, and I have asked him in email five different times since then to give me a clearly written version of what he stated on the phone (he asked more than that) but he is unwilling to do so. In any case I will still hold to my word and not be posting here unless he contacts me and says that he has changed his mind or that I radically misinterpreted what he said on the phone (there were stronger statements made than just issues of posting on his forum - that was just what I agreed to). The latter is why I asked him in email *five* different times since then to clearify what he stated on the phone, stating clearly what I heard him say and asking for confirmation and a clear written record to eliminate any "he said, she said" confusion. The emails did get through to him as some of them went through other people in his shop and they confirmed they got the messages and passes them on to Chris. I have had no responce.
-Cliff
