Talonite

M

Marsot

Joined
Mar 30, 2001
Messages
3
Hello,

I found on the web some technical informations about "Talonite".
It seems that blades made with this allloy are very performant.

I am very interrested by deboning knives (or chief knives) made with Talonite and I am searching where I can bought these kind of knives


thanks for your help:)
 
My understanding of Talonite is that it is quite soft and ductile, but in low-stress cutting the edge will last a very, very long time with easy resharpening when it does go dull. Given its ductility, I would question its advantage in boning knives. Using Forschner stainless knives back when I was a meatcutter there was the occasional nicked or rolled edge from hitting (not chopping) hard bones while trying to trim out meat close to the bones. I would expect those same impacts to cause pretty serious edge deformation in a Talonite blade. If you were using it at the bench for purely trimming fat or cutting boneless meat, I could see it as an advantageous metal for the blade.

As for who could make that Talonite boning blade for you, check out the makers listed at http://www.geocities.com/mdpoff/talonite.html if you haven't seen that page already. The cost of the Talonite will make for a very expensive boning knife, about $80-$90 for a Talonite blank big enough to make a 6" boning knife. Prices from CPI are listed at http://www.carbideprocessors.com/Knives/Talonite_knife_prices.htm When you compare that to the $25 cost of a steel boning knife, the performance would have to be pretty exceptional to justify the cost. Not that this sort of consideration has ever slowed down a dedicated knife knut. ;)

If you want to buy some Talonite, here is the CPI contact info:
Carbide Processors, Inc.
3847 S. Union Ave. Tacoma, WA 98409
Phone 253-476-1338 / 800-346-8274 / Fax 253-476-1321
tomwalz@email.msn.com
http://www.carbideprocessors.com
 
Welcome to Bladeforums, Marsot.
Over the course of the past couple years there has been a tremendous amount of discussion here on the subject of Talonite. I would highly recommend using this site's search feature (just search on "Talonite") to view past threads from the Blade Discussion Forum, the Custom Forum and the Knife Reviews and Testing Forum. There are also several excellent threads located in the archives of these forums.

Beyond that, I do seem to remember that at least one of our resident chefs has had experience with Talonite in the kitchen. It may have been Chefget, but I can't remember for sure. At any rate, there's a good chance you'll get some additional insight here from a culinary professional. Good luck.:)
 
Marsot; I also extend my welcome to you to the forums.

It was almost exactly two years ago that Nick Blinoff took delivery of the prototype Talonite (r) chef's knife, made by Rob Simonich. The knife has a 10" blade, and is 17" OAL, made of 1/8" Talonite (r). Nick Blinoff is a professional chef, and one of the two chefs who graciously tested the prototype; Michael Gettier (chefget) being the other. Nick raved about the knife when he received it, and gave me this follow up after having had it for about a year (he was the lucky one who got to keep it):

In regards to the Talonite monster... It is still going strong! I still am using it as my number one chopper everyday, and I am still an enthusiastic Talonite supporter.... Boy does this stuff hold an edge or what?

The only thing that is taking some getting used to is the technique of
sharpening the blade. I think I'm up to four times on the Edge pro {not bad for over a year! ).
Click to expand...

The concerns expressed by the poster above about the edge turning seem to not be a concern with good blade geometry (and Rob knows how to utilize REALLY GOOD blade geometry). Nick has had no problems with this, and Michael Gettier had this to say:

First, let me say what a sincerely pleasurable diversion this knife collaboration has been! As I sit here, knife in hand, I am in awe of not only the knife but the forces that have brought it to this point...for the past week I've been using this superb chef knife that arrived in the mail. Don't mean to get maudlin but I'm truly humbled.

In telling the tale to the kitchen staff, they are as impressed with the people involved as with the knife itself (well, almost).

As to the knife; when Nick first told me he had not yet sharpened the
knife, my immediate reaction was "gonna have to put an edge on this
puppy"...but this was not this case. After using the knife for a week
(including "Lobster Night"), the blade still needs no sharpening. What
is just as suprising to me is how responsive the edge is to a steel.
Several strokes and it is back to laser.
Click to expand...

Here is a picture of the prototype, with the original Corion (r) scales on; they were later changed to G10, as the Corion chipped slightly in shipping.

And, yes, that is one BIG slab of Talonite the knife is resting on.

You may well ask where the other knives are. Well, the answer is that Rob has been busy, but I have managed to get him to make one more for my eldest daughter, Ann. It has the G10 scales on it. She loves it. Here is a picture. It is not a good one, as the knife is resting on Christine's (Rob's wife) back, and the Talonite tickles her and makes her move.



Rob is presently working on a couple of chef's knives for me, one for my younger daughter, and one for daddy. :) He is also working on a smaller chef's knife, one with a 6" blade.

Thus, the good news is that Talonite makes a dynamite knife, in my opinion, and that of two professional chefs, unsurpassed. The bad news is that there may be a significant delay in obtaining one, and the cost, $400, may be prohibitive to some.

Hope this helps, Walt
Editing, trying to get the Photopoint hyperlinks to work. If anyone knows what I am doing wrong with the code, fill me in please. I hate to post the big pics and be a bandwidth hog. :barf: Walt
 
It occurs to me that our newer forumites may not know that clicking on the small pictures in the post will enlarge them. Or so it is supposed to work.

Other kitchen knives have been made; Kit Carson has made me some paring knives that (surprise) my two daughters mooched off of me. The blades were 3" and 4", and the scales Corion (r) the same as the original scales on the prototype chef's knife. Here is a pic of the paring knives:





Cackling madly with Cobalt sickness, I remain (formerly whacko) Walt
 
Welcome to Bladeforums

We developed Talonite for knives. We had been selling it for industrial and military uses when someone told us that the scrap made great knives. We thought it was too expensive. We didn't think that there were enough knife users who could appreciate the superior performance enough to offset the additional cost. Boy, were we wrong.

Talonite is expensive for the same reason custom knives are expensive. We make the very best product we can with extreme attention to detail.

You can get a free Talonite knife if you win one of our contests. We run contests here and we buy custom knives from knife makers, which they then give away at knife shows. I think the next one is the guild show in Florida. The S.R. Johnson knife we are giving away is truly wonderful.

Camillus has taken Simonich designs and is producing knives in Talonite. They do a really great job of getting custom look and feel in a production knife.

There is a lot of information on Talonite and even more opinion. Our official position is that all that counts is how well the knife works for each and every user. If one reviewer severely criticizes Talonite and a hundred knife users write in to defend it we think they are all correct and entitled to their opinions. I do not think that anyone has the right or can tell someone else what alloy to buy. A knife is intensely personal.

One of my favorite knife stories comes from France. I love the attitude.

http://www.geocities.com/carbideprocessors/flavius.doc

Tom
 
Bonjour Marsot, ca va bien ? (Three years of high school + 1 college semester of French, and that's the best I can muster!)

Welcome to the Forums.

I have limited experience using commercial grade kitchen knives when I was younger. From my experience, the priority is that they be cheap (because they wear out/disappear) and very sharp, and plentiful (because they walk away, and half of them are always out of the shop for their weekly sharpening). This usually translates into high-carbon stainless steels with wood or plastic (better) handles. Talonite, while a great material, might be expensive to use in this role. On the other hand, if you are a professional chef that takes his roll of knives with him wherever you go, it may be a nice treat for yourself.
 
Welcome to the forums and you can really learn a lot here as I have since becoming a member.
ps: I was in France when I was in the service in 1967 place called Orleans we were tearing down buildings and sending them back to germany.the best to you.
 
Salut,

Yes, talonite makes performant blades. But they don't come cheap, the material itself is quite expencive and VERY difficult to grind/work. An important thing is talonite doesn't rust, wich might be great for a kitchen knife. Some users said that the edge rolls quite easy, but if you know your way with a steel (fusil) that's not a problem.

A+
Flavius
 
Talonite is the only blade material that has never disappointed me. The stuff cuts like crazy, even when it feels dull. No, it won't shave when it really feels dull, but I would still strongly discourage anyone from running their finger along the edge in that case.

I've had a Camillus Talon for probably about a year now, and I still just don't understand the stuff. It outperforms every other knife material that I have. Those include D2, M2, A2, ATS-34, 154CM, BG42, and 440V. I just used my Talon while removing the carpeting from my house. With all the grit accumulated in the carpet over 12 years, the knife still went through the heavy mat backing like butter. It did get to the point that it wouldn't cut the carpet while it was laying on the floor, but it appeared the edge had rolled after hitting something harder than wood or backing; I'm guessing either a nail, or those infamous staples. But, the edge didn't roll NEARLY as bad as I would have thought.

I LOVE the stuff. If you can afford it, it is worth the premium price.
 
Marsot,

Walt's post should have gone a long way to answering your question regarding chef's knives.

I would be curious as to the performance of Talonite in a boning or fillet knife. I would imagine this would be great around saltwater, such as we have here in Miami, FL. I would think that it would be fine in a stiff fillet knife. I generally use a stiff Wusthoff boning knife as my fillet knife.

Can anyone comment on how flexible it is? I did manage to bend the thin tip on a Boye folder, made of dendritic cobalt, but do not know how good an indicator that is. It bent back OK, but not by itself. I just angled the knife the other way in the plastic I was slicing...and then I went and got a stouter knife, a Chris Reeve Shadow III.

I like using my Talonite knifes in the kitchen, although I do not have a dedicated kitchen knife in that material. They are great for slicing citrus fruit, as you do not have to worry about them staining. :) Some foods can be affected by a steel knife, especially a carbon steel knife. I imagine Talonite would be superior in this respect, as it is non-reactive. Any comments?

Since Talonite, as I understand it, is used in scraping vats in which cereal is made, I imagine it is food safe. Some posters have expressed that cobalt can be carcinogenic and protection should be worn when grinding it. Can anyone comment on these aspects of Talonite?:rolleyes:

I believe that a smooth steel is better than a rough one, in maintaining the edge. When I used a rough one on a Talonite blade, it made it worse. Perhaps it was my technique and/or the rough grooves pulled out or misaligned the carbides in the relatively soft material. It was easy to sharpen with a about 5 strokes per side on the white Spyderco 204 hones. I later chopped some dead bamboo with a Talonite blade. This is harder than it sounds. It had no visible effect, but the knife would no longer slice tomatos. Running it along a smooth steel improved the edge significantly. I have not yet sharpened it.

Talonite works well, and there is something special about not having to worry about maintaining one's knife, from a corrosion standpoint.
:D
Donald.
 
Great questions

1. Talonite is flexible or not. Rubber can be extremely brittle and you can bend glass. We took an 18 " long piece, clamped it in a vice and bent it. It came back from 80 degrees and snapped at 90 degrees. This is a highly informal test. About all it says is that you can bend it a whole bunch then it breaks. See: http://www.carbideprocessors.com/Knives/Talonite_knife_working.htm

2. I use my Camillus Cudas in the kitchen because Camillus has not come out with the full line of kitchen knives. (Will Fennell and Jim Furgal of Camillus, both great guys; keep saying something about who will buy them. When they think there's a market they will make them.)

I agree with you about not liking the corrosion on the knife and the taste on the food. Talonite doesn't do either. Talonite is USDA food safe.

Idea - I emailed Will. I will give Marsot, the New Guy From France, a Camillus Cuda Simonich neck knife in Talonite if he will write a review on how it works with food. Marsot, how does this sound? My rules on this are that I give you the knife to keep. You use it as you wish, not abuse it. (E. G. cooking is great. Clamping it in a vice and hitting it with a hammer is not.) Then you write what you honestly feel. When we got into this with Rob and later with Camillus we all agreed that we would make knives that the knife user thought were great knives. The only test that really counts is whether any user likes the knife in their hand doing what they want a knife to do.

3. Cobalt and chrome can be dangerous. Talonite has both in it. However a big part of what makes Talonite such a great alloy is that it is an alloy. The cobalt and chrome are tightly alloyed with each other as well as other materials. They are bound together into something new that is extremely non-reactive. If you either eat Sodium or breathe Chlorine you will die a horrible death. If you combine them into sodium chloride you have ordinary, Morton table salt.
See: http://www.carbideprocessors.com/Knives/Talonite_knife_msds.htm

We do recommend using a mask or some other means of dust control when you grind because it is not a good idea to put lots of hard, sharp particles in your lungs no matter what the material is. Remember that Talonite is a cousin of alloys we use industrially. I have 11 sections of a book about this including lists of the original research papers, OSHA, NIOSH data etc. See: http://www.carbideprocessors.com/Brazing/book/40.htm#paper3

I don't want to sound preachy but I had parents and teachers and a church and the Boy Scouts that taught me a respect for the world in general and that you have a serious responsibility for your actions and how you affect the world around you. (I like knife people because a whole lot of them understand this and live this way also.)Part of our success on the industrial side comes from developing safer, cleaner processes. We develop non-cyanide processes to replace cyanide based ones. We are developing ceramic saw tips to reduce cobalt exposure in filing rooms and so on. We are very careful about what we sell and we supply information to use our products safely.

Tom
 
Donald; I had much the same experience with a Boye dendritic Co folder. Or, more precisely, Steve Harvey did. He was making radial cuts in the bottom of a large soft drink bottle when the middle of the edge bent slightly (so slightly that my old eyes could barely see it, but Harv could easily see it). We then tested some Talonite (r) knives:

We took a Darrel Ralph custom knife, much like an Apogee, and started making radial cuts as before. A section of the edge, about an inch long and 1/16" wide actually tore right out. Harv was apalled, as it was my new knife, but I was delighted to finally have some good test data. Darrel was, at the time, new to Talonite blade grinding, and had made the edge too thin (Harv even remarked at the time how thin the blade edge was). I returned the knife to Darrel, and he ground a new blade with a different profile, which has performed flawlessly since.

A few minutes after the failure of the Darrel Ralph blade, I took my Kit Carson #18 folder (Harv declined to try it out, I wonder why? :)), and proceeded to cut through every plastic bottle in sight, then switched to plastic flower pots, with grit and dirt still in the bottoms. No problems at all.

My daughter (the same one that got the Talonite chef's knife and the Talonite paring knife) sweet talked me out of my Rob Simonich Wambli with fossil mammoth ivory scales; she has used the knife for everything, including wallpapering, and it has performed absolutely perfectly. There is a natural lubricity to Talonite. My daughter has noted a marked difference cutting through meat with her Talonite blades as compared with her steel blades.

These data indicate what I have said before: the ductility of Talonite is not a problem with blade performance if the blade geometry is correct for the alloy. Knifesmiths are familiar with the alloy by now, and they now utilize correct geometry, so you really shouldn't worry.

Bladezealot/Russ: GREAT LINK to a great thread. I had forgotten that Talonite: Good, Bad or Ugly had ran to 17 pages!!! Just one thing. I am a cat person, and your ball peen hammer has always struck me as being funny. Would you consider losing that Lactrodectus mactans that comes down in your avatar, however? I am afraid that some night in a somewhat altered state, I might put a 230 gr. bullet through my monitor! Way too creepy!!

Also, THE definitive website regarding Talonite and other Co alloys is Marion David Poffs' excellent one:


Tom; you are a generous gentlemen indeed. Giving Marsot a Talonite neck knife is a marvelous gesture of international goodwill. My compliments.

If you are wondering about a scarcity of Talonite (just a rumor) it is because Will Fennell has a huge warehouse stocked with Talonite web (the stuff left over when you stamp out blades). :p :D My modest (only a dozen or so, honest) collection of Talonite knives has nothing to do with any imaginary scarcity. Really. :)

Still whacko (and was before I was exposed to cobalt) Walt
 
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