Steel that gets the sharpest... ?

BePrepared

BePrepared

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Aug 26, 2010
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In your experience, what steel gets the sharpest. Retention and durability aside, what steel that you own gets sharper than all the others?

I have one knife, a custom d2 skinner, that gets unbelievably sharp... sharper even than my INFI knife. It is the only knife i own that i can return to "hair whittling" sharp
 
I too got my sharpest edge on D2 steel. INFI comes next (busse), then 1095 (beckers), 5160 steel, and finally 1075 (condor)/1055 <-- those are tough to get a sharp edge for some reason
 
the steel i got the sharpest is kershaw's steel ,Sandvik 14C28N stainless steel, only way i was ever able to whittle a free hanging hair. VG-10 is very hard for me to get that sharp. i dont microbevel so my edges are gone within 2 swipes of cardboard.
 
My condor boomslang takes a very nice edge for such a large blade, but since it's primarily a chopper, i stop at shaving with pressure sharp.

I have a 5160 kukri that i sharpened until it will shave under VERY light pressure, but even with a fully polished edge, it won't feather tissue.

My busse will feather paper and shave with virtually no pressure, but it simply will not whittle hair.

The custom skinner is sharper than any of them by a wide margin, and required a minimum of work to get it that way

All 4 of these knives are .25" thick, covexed to the same angle, and sharpened on a strop with 3 compounds and plain leather until the very edge has a mirror polish...

it has to be the steel... i can't figure out what else it could be
 
Something along:

White#1 -> V2 -> white#2 -> blue#1 -> AS -> zdp-189 -> SG2 -> VG-10 -> M4 -> SKD/D2 -> S30V
 
do you think that hardness would make it possible to get it sharper?

my skinner is 62rc... the rest are 58-60 afaik
 
I use a Wicked Edge, so I feel I get a good idea of which steels see to get sharper than other since they are all basically getting sharpened as sharp as they possibly can, all with a mirror polish and with almost zero user error. The only thing that makes much of a difference is the angle of the edge, but I tend to reprofile most of my blades to a similar angle (usually from 30 to maybe 34 or 36 degrees inclusive) and I think it's mostly just the steels themselves that do the talking. So far, I seem to get EXTREME sharpness out of CTS-XHP. It may not be the greatest steel, but I just love it. Easy to sharpen and gets amazingly sharp. I'm also very fond of every knife I own with it, and I love the designs of some other knives I'll be buying with XHP :) I love how much Spyderco is starting to use it. Anyway, I actually have to agree that Sandvik 14C28N gets really sharp, even if it doesn't hold that sharpness for long at all. Another favorite steel of mine is M4, and that stuff gets outstandingly sharp. M390 seems to be up there as well, along with D2. S30V and S35VN can get plenty sharp too.... maybe it's just the Wicked Edge lol. It seems like they're all crazy sharp. But really, CTS-XHP is the standout to me, and S30V/S35VN really are no slouch.
 
i will hazard zdp 189 since it's heavy on the finer Cr carbides that allow for sharpness. not much of the larger Vanadium carbides that bring about wear resistance.
 
BePrepared said:
In your experience, what steel gets the sharpest. Retention and durability aside, what steel that you own gets sharper than all the others?

I have one knife, a custom d2 skinner, that gets unbelievably sharp... sharper even than my INFI knife. It is the only knife i own that i can return to "hair whittling" sharp
Click to expand...

what type of sharpener do you use?
 
BePrepared said:
I use a work sharp wskts from 80 grit to 1800 grit, then i move to a strop with black->green ->pink -> bare leather

then i'm done
Click to expand...
You wouldn't happen to own the 4 sided strop bat from JRE, would you? ;)
 
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