Steel Ranking Help

A

A1Sage

Joined
Mar 31, 2023
Messages
3
I haven't made any knives yet, but I am getting really close to starting. I want to make a real splash in the industry right out of the gate, so I would like to make my first knife with a new steel. I don't know anything about metallurgy, so I was wondering if someone could help explain to me the existing steel name encoding scheme and how it relates to steel superiority. I obviously understand that 1095 is 11 units better than 1084, but 11 what? To account for steels like D2 and A2, I thought that maybe steel naming is done in the hexadecimal number system, however this does not account for steels like MagnaCut. The only reasonable conclusion then is that the steel naming scheme is encoded in the base 36 number system. I converted a selection of common steel names from base 36 into decimal, sorted them, and then plotted their decimal values as seen in the figure below. Note that the y-axis is in a logarithmic scale. This gives a nice way to visualize steel ranking, but still does not address the y-axis units. MagnaCut is 46,476,711,401,436,500 decimal units better than A2, but 46,476,711,401,436,500 what? I still don't understand what these units are. And why is the naming done in base 36? This is really making my head spin. Anyways, during my research on converting between number bases, I found (as seen in the chart) that 'Aluminum Foil' is 1,349,629,979,853,190,000 units (30 times!!) better than MagnaCut. It seems like there is an opportunity to pioneer an aluminum foil based damascus that would really blow MagnaCut out of the water. I'll play around with the forging and heat treatment process for that before I report back.

https://imgur.com/a5MUH5C
 
🤣 good one
 
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