Super Steels vs Regular Steels

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another great article Sir. this one should hit home here. I dont often think about toughness in folders where a lot of the super steels tend to end up, but your point on the tradeoff of wear resistance instead of toughness, is a good one.
 
All steels are a trade-off between wear resistance, toughness, corrosion resistance, and cost.

IMO, the difference is that wear resistance benefits all users - with all other factors held constant, the more, the better. In other words, I don't think there's such a thing as a knife being "too" wear resistant for someone. I'm ignoring ease of sharpening in that assessment - see the final paragraph.

The other factors are something where you can have "too much" for your needs. For example, I find that steels like 3V won't rust in the environments in which I use them, so anything that's more corrosion resistant than that doesn't really benefit me. Same with toughness - I'm not chopping through hardwoods with embedded nails, so I don't need the toughness of 1055.

In other words, find the steel (with the corresponding heat treat and geometry) that delivers enough toughness and corrosion resistance for your needs, and that you can afford. Beyond that, go for the most wear resistance you can get.

I'm ignoring ease of sharpening in that, unless you need to be able to field sharpen a knife on a piece of granite, or find diamond stones prohibitively expensive, all steels should be sharpenable by all users (with practice and patience). Spending more time per sharpening, but doing it much less often, is IMO an easy trade-off to make - I can't really thing of a use case (other than field sharpening) where that trade-off wouldn't make sense.
 
Intriguing question. The definition seems to evolve with new(er) steels. Powder steels pretty well encompass 'super steels' for me.
 
tyyreaun said:
All steels are a trade-off between wear resistance, toughness, corrosion resistance, and cost.

IMO, the difference is that wear resistance benefits all users - with all other factors held constant, the more, the better. In other words, I don't think there's such a thing as a knife being "too" wear resistant for someone. I'm ignoring ease of sharpening in that assessment - see the final paragraph.

The other factors are something where you can have "too much" for your needs. For example, I find that steels like 3V won't rust in the environments in which I use them, so anything that's more corrosion resistant than that doesn't really benefit me. Same with toughness - I'm not chopping through hardwoods with embedded nails, so I don't need the toughness of 1055.

In other words, find the steel (with the corresponding heat treat and geometry) that delivers enough toughness and corrosion resistance for your needs, and that you can afford. Beyond that, go for the most wear resistance you can get.

I'm ignoring ease of sharpening in that, unless you need to be able to field sharpen a knife on a piece of granite, or find diamond stones prohibitively expensive, all steels should be sharpenable by all users (with practice and patience). Spending more time per sharpening, but doing it much less often, is IMO an easy trade-off to make - I can't really thing of a use case (other than field sharpening) where that trade-off wouldn't make sense.
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Yes individual needs are difficult to write about broadly, but in an idea world one could purchase a knife that has exactly the tradeoffs that are best for us. I think the potential alternative view to what you are describing for maximizing wear resistance is for very thin, low angle edges. If using a pocket knife that only cuts light materials toughness won't matter much. But if using a kitchen knife that cuts hard foods and contacts a cutting board with a thin, low angle edge, both high hardness and toughness are necessary to avoid rolling and chipping. If using thicker geometry then it doesn't matter. It all depends on the knife and the user.
 
An excellent article showing the subjectivity of the term super steel.
Any chance of doing toughness tests for basic steels like 5160 and 1060
I wonder how they compare to 3V and S7
 
Revolverrodger said:
An excellent article showing the subjectivity of the term super steel.
Any chance of doing toughness tests for basic steels like 5160 and 1060
I wonder how they compare to 3V and S7
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Sure there is a good chance. I've been a little surprised by the lack of interest by knifemakers in sending me samples to test. When I am setup for making the samples myself it will hopefully go faster.
 
Larrin said:
In this article I answer the following questions:
Were "super steels" invented by the internet?
Is there a standard definition for super steel?
Is "super steel" a positive or a negative term?
What properties do super steels have?

https://knifesteelnerds.com/2018/10/01/super-steels-vs-regular-knife-steels/
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I always took it as meaning the latest steels which push the boundaries of steel science or particularly excell at one or more catagory of performance.(toughness, edge retention, attainable hardness)

Being really really corrosion resistant typically doesn’t qualify a steel as super unless it has some extra trick up its sleeve. Some consider h1 a super steel in that it is completely rustproof; although the fact that it has been around for a while it is often not thought of as a super steel.

What makes a highly corossion reistant steel a super steel is when it also maintains good edge retention or toughness like LC200N. This seems to be due to the fact that it seems to push the boundaries of metallurgy.

That really is probably the best way to describe a super steel; it pushes the frontiers of what a steel can do.
 
marrenmiller said:
Isn't INFI a steel + HT protocol?

I'd love to see how much of that steel is hype.
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In my experience, INFI performance (toughness) starts to suck when reground for slicing. Edge maintains integrity better at 20-25 DPS when reground to .030-.020 behind the edge.
 
This feels like a straw-man thread to me. Of course, "super" isn't a technical term with a tight definition. Neither is "high performance." Or "excellent." Or "rad." Or "awesome."

Even "stainless" has different definitions. Does that mean there are no stainless steels?

But if you look at any of the characteristics of knife steels -- stainless, wear resistance, toughness, strength -- some steels are going to perform much, much better than others. We all know about Ankerson's cutting tests. The number of cuts a steel can achieve ranges from 80 (XC90) to 2,400 (10V) -- a performance boost of 2,900 percent. Somewhere along that line, high-wear steels deserve to be called "super." Who has the technical definition of a high-wear steel?

You can find the same spread on every other characteristic. You can find steels that exceed other steels on every characteristic, unless you include both wear resistance and ease of sharpening.

We tend to forget that geometry cuts, and steel plus heat treat determines how aggressive that geometry can be for any given task.

I rarely buy a knife these days that doesn't have a blade crafted from a super steel.
 
Charlie Mike said:
Super steels aren't super once the next one comes out. The marginal increase in performance isn't worth the hype but manufacturers sell it and consumers buy it.

Remember that PD1/Spectrumwear/Cruwear/Zwear is just Vascowear.
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Maybe that's true if we talk about knives , but most super steel are manufactured for industry and the largest part of the production of steel goes there . And there my friend even small increase in performance is HUGE ................
 
Definitely!
 
Megawatt308 said:
Always choose your steel based on how you will use them and what is important to you. Edge retention, corrosion resistance or resharpening ability to keep it very simple when it comes to folders.
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And fixed blades, too.
 
Larrin said:
Sure there is a good chance. I've been a little surprised by the lack of interest by knifemakers in sending me samples to test. When I am setup for making the samples myself it will hopefully go faster.
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Do you think that these super steels can be HT properly in Evenheat electrical oven ?
 
Natlek said:
Do you think that these super steels can be HT properly in Evenheat electrical oven ?
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They get up to 2200 degrees F, so yes. They seem to be quite popular for small knifemakers, and I'm considering picking one up once I have a space of my own to work in.
 
marrenmiller said:
They get up to 2200 degrees F, so yes. They seem to be quite popular for small knifemakers, and I'm considering picking one up once I have a space of my own to work in.
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There are plenty of more important things for one HT oven to do , besides reaching this temperature .
 
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