Too much worry about steel types?

Is it from a meteorite?:D

Mecha said:
My steel? You don't even want to know about my steel. It has more protons packed per angstrom than any other steel (including Rostafrei). My steel? My steel has carbides the size of a bull's balls, chromium oozing from every interstitial crevice, tungsten-tipped and inox infused. Harder than Cap'n Crunch, more wear-resistant than last year's skinny jeans. Yakuza approved and Triad tried-n-true.

My steel? You don't even want to know about my steel.
Click to expand...
 
I have Victorinox and Buck. I like them because they're easy to sharpen while holding an edge long enough to get a job done. Unless it's cutting boxes all day. I read a few chime in on this thread about needing supersteel to cut cardboard all day. I just save my money and use the razor utility knife that whatever company I'm working for provides. They're not sexy or showy but a razor blade lasts days, then flip it over and get some more days. When it's time to replace the blade, they're free or at least only costs the company. I've priced for myself and a utility knife and extra blades are cheap. They cut banding as well. Also used on carpet, and I've had friends who laid carpet for a living and that's all they use, the cheap utility knife and blades.
My question for those who read this and insist you have to have expensive supersteel knives to cut cardboard or carpet all day is 'Why?'. I mean I can appreciate wanting a personal knife with an edge that lasts forever, but for cardboard? If I ever work with someone on a job where we're cutting lots of cardboard and the other pulls out a hundred or two hundred dollar knife and starts being a blowhard about it's great steel and such, I'll be laughing at him while using my 5 dollar utility knife to accomplish the same thing just as efficiently.
 
bt93 said:
I have Victorinox and Buck. I like them because they're easy to sharpen while holding an edge long enough to get a job done. Unless it's cutting boxes all day. I read a few chime in on this thread about needing supersteel to cut cardboard all day. I just save my money and use the razor utility knife that whatever company I'm working for provides. They're not sexy or showy but a razor blade lasts days, then flip it over and get some more days. When it's time to replace the blade, they're free or at least only costs the company. I've priced for myself and a utility knife and extra blades are cheap. They cut banding as well. Also used on carpet, and I've had friends who laid carpet for a living and that's all they use, the cheap utility knife and blades.
My question for those who read this and insist you have to have expensive supersteel knives to cut cardboard or carpet all day is 'Why?'. I mean I can appreciate wanting a personal knife with an edge that lasts forever, but for cardboard? If I ever work with someone on a job where we're cutting lots of cardboard and the other pulls out a hundred or two hundred dollar knife and starts being a blowhard about it's great steel and such, I'll be laughing at him while using my 5 dollar utility knife to accomplish the same thing just as efficiently.
Click to expand...

Arguably more efficiently because of the extremely thin geometry.
 
bt93 said:
I have Victorinox and Buck. I like them because they're easy to sharpen while holding an edge long enough to get a job done. Unless it's cutting boxes all day. I read a few chime in on this thread about needing supersteel to cut cardboard all day. I just save my money and use the razor utility knife that whatever company I'm working for provides. They're not sexy or showy but a razor blade lasts days, then flip it over and get some more days. When it's time to replace the blade, they're free or at least only costs the company. I've priced for myself and a utility knife and extra blades are cheap. They cut banding as well. Also used on carpet, and I've had friends who laid carpet for a living and that's all they use, the cheap utility knife and blades.
My question for those who read this and insist you have to have expensive supersteel knives to cut cardboard or carpet all day is 'Why?'. I mean I can appreciate wanting a personal knife with an edge that lasts forever, but for cardboard? If I ever work with someone on a job where we're cutting lots of cardboard and the other pulls out a hundred or two hundred dollar knife and starts being a blowhard about it's great steel and such, I'll be laughing at him while using my 5 dollar utility knife to accomplish the same thing just as efficiently.
Click to expand...

I don't really like having less than an inch of blade available for cutting. That's one of only two problem I have with utility knives; they extend so little of the blade. I'd strongly prefer to have at least two inches of edge available at my disposal for any cutting job that may come my way. Granted, there's the utility knives with extendable, snapable blades, but they flex too much for comfort; there was this one time I was using a utility knife with a snapable blade to cut up a box for disposal; the blade got stuck mid cut and it flexed so much I was really concerned it may just break on the spot.

My second gripe is that I just can't seem to cut zip ties, especially the thicker, heavy duty ones, for squat with the utility knife. But my cheap folding knife with its thicker blade can do it almost effortlessly.
 
mael333ca said:
a little exaggerated perhaps, but still, I myself test my knives from time to time. Totally in a non controlled way I must admit, but the one time I observed a clear as day difference in performance, is when I compared a buck vantage select with a byrd g10 caracara2.

I just made shaving with a piece of softwood lumber with both knives freshly sharpened to an about equally keen edge. Now clear as day, the 420HC vantage lost it's edge in the very first cuts, while the 8cr on the byrd kept it well... I understand the edge geometry is key here and the Rhc is apparently a few points higher with spyderco's 8cr vs buck's 420hc, so it would be a mistake to blame the steels themselves.
Click to expand...

No, not exaggerated, actual use.
 
I agree with OP that most people get by with any known decent blade steel. However, there are those of us whose job requires a knife. Like Bodog states, we use our knives in ways that would give most people here nightmares.
The "right tool for the job" argument sounds good on paper, but doesn't work out in practice, Bodog already touched on this. The only way to understand this is to be in our shoes. My job is different than his, but the same applies.
I don't worry about knife steels because after many years of using many types, I have a good idea what class of steel works for what now.
If you want to know what lasts longest for cutting cardboard or rope, alot of that data is available. If you want to know how an edge holds up to side loading and contacting more destructive materials than cardboard and rope, that's something you have to find out for yourself. I know the answer, but it's obviously useless information for most here, from the responses I've seen about abuse blah blah blah.

Discussing knife use on this forum, is sometimes like discussing hunting on a peta forum - lol.
 
jpm2 said:
I agree with OP that most people get by with any known decent blade steel. However, there are those of us whose job requires a knife. Like Bodog states, we use our knives in ways that would give most people here nightmares.
The "right tool for the job" argument sounds good on paper, but doesn't work out in practice, Bodog already touched on this. The only way to understand this is to be in our shoes. My job is different than his, but the same applies.
I don't worry about knife steels because after many years of using many types, I have a good idea what class of steel works for what now.
If you want to know what lasts longest for cutting cardboard or rope, alot of that data is available. If you want to know how an edge holds up to side loading and contacting more destructive materials than cardboard and rope, that's something you have to find out for yourself. I know the answer, but it's obviously useless information for most here, from the responses I've seen about abuse blah blah blah.

Discussing knife use on this forum, is sometimes like discussing hunting on a peta forum - lol.
Click to expand...

I'm curious about what steel you've found that works the best for you. I have to be honest, the ZT 0180 isn't the perfect knife by any means but it's stood up to things that have made my jaw drop, and that includes cutting cardboard but includes many, many more things. I just bought some wood and associated supplies to rehabilitate the thing, eg rehandle the knife and grind the blade down just a little bit thinner. Hopefully I don't screw it up. The steel, Vanadis 4E, is something else man.
 
bt93 said:
I have Victorinox and Buck. I like them because they're easy to sharpen while holding an edge long enough to get a job done. Unless it's cutting boxes all day. I read a few chime in on this thread about needing supersteel to cut cardboard all day. I just save my money and use the razor utility knife that whatever company I'm working for provides. They're not sexy or showy but a razor blade lasts days, then flip it over and get some more days. When it's time to replace the blade, they're free or at least only costs the company. I've priced for myself and a utility knife and extra blades are cheap. They cut banding as well. Also used on carpet, and I've had friends who laid carpet for a living and that's all they use, the cheap utility knife and blades.
My question for those who read this and insist you have to have expensive supersteel knives to cut cardboard or carpet all day is 'Why?'. I mean I can appreciate wanting a personal knife with an edge that lasts forever, but for cardboard? If I ever work with someone on a job where we're cutting lots of cardboard and the other pulls out a hundred or two hundred dollar knife and starts being a blowhard about it's great steel and such, I'll be laughing at him while using my 5 dollar utility knife to accomplish the same thing just as efficiently.
Click to expand...

Now imagine if your utility knife had little custom utility blades made from CPM 3V and hand-stropped to a mirror finish. Slicing Double-wall reinforced cardboard would be like cutting scrambled eggs.
 
Mecha said:
Now imagine if your utility knife had little custom utility blades made from CPM 3V and hand-stropped to a mirror finish. Slicing Double-wall reinforced cardboard would be like cutting scrambled eggs.
Click to expand...

How about razor blades made of S110V?
 
Cobalt said:
How about razor blades made of S110V?
Click to expand...

Steel so super it wears brightly-colored underwear on the outside of its pants.

Ultra steel.
 
bodog said:
I'm curious about what steel you've found that works the best for you. I have to be honest, the ZT 0180 isn't the perfect knife by any means but it's stood up to things that have made my jaw drop, and that includes cutting cardboard but includes many, many more things. I just bought some wood and associated supplies to rehabilitate the thing, eg rehandle the knife and grind the blade down just a little bit thinner. Hopefully I don't screw it up. The steel, Vanadis 4E, is something else man.
Click to expand...
For my work use, it's high speed tool steels.
My search for a blade that would perform better started almost 30 years ago. I found my answer when watching a machinist cut a shaft. The tool doing the cutting was a flat bar of steel called a parting tool.

I've since made a few knives from those tools and other HS steels. They've given me the best balance of edge wear and resistance to chipping & rolling when contacting other metals than anything I've tried. The closest steels I have tried that's commercially available, and I've tried many, are M2 and CPM M4, both HS steels.

Clearly, my needs at work are out of the ordinary for knife use. But those blades are also good for everything else I do, outside of work.

I ordered the mule #21, curious to see how it holds up. 4v is close to vanadis 4e composition-wise, we'll see.

I also bought 2 BCMW's per my specs in SQ 52100.

hatchettjack said:
I've heard benchmade uses a mixture of unobtainium and valerian in their steels and just mark them D2
Click to expand...

Definately a different D2 than my benchmade. After cutting one motor lead apart, or scraping corrosion off a connector, mine's so mangled it can not continue the job. Same result with a D2 kershaw. Doing the same with other steels will barely shine the edge in spots, at most.
 
We had a "seaman" from the East Coast a year or two ago...that had the job of cutting thick rope all day long. He was going nuts trying to find a steel that would hold up. For this guy, the steel was important. For my casual use, steel type is not so important but I'm a steel snob, so you know....
 
Last edited:
At the scrapyard I need to baton through a lot of super-steel to break it down for shipment to the smelters across the Pacific. I look no further than mega steel to handle my cutting needs. Ultra steel, well yes, it has its place, but for true mega cutting power I need sulfides, nitrides, bromides, oxides and cow-hides (for the mega sheath). I need microalloying, microstructures so small they makes obsidian blush. Irregular crystal grain growth that guffaws at crack propagation. Covalent bonds that grab ahold of those surrounding atoms and hold on like a monkey with his fist in a pickle jar! Mega steel that can be dipped into the beam of a particle accelerator and split atoms into sub-nuclear fractions of reality so fine that it advances physics and our understanding of the nature of the universe as we know it.

You don't even want to know about my mega steel.
 
Mecha said:
At the scrapyard I need to baton through a lot of super-steel to break it down for shipment to the smelters across the Pacific. I look no further than mega steel to handle my cutting needs. Ultra steel, well yes, it has its place, but for true mega cutting power I need sulfides, nitrides, bromides, oxides and cow-hides (for the mega sheath). I need microalloying, microstructures so small they makes obsidian blush. Irregular crystal grain growth that guffaws at crack propagation. Covalent bonds that grab ahold of those surrounding atoms and hold on like a monkey with his fist in a pickle jar! Mega steel that can be dipped into the beam of a particle accelerator and split atoms into sub-nuclear fractions of reality so fine that it advances physics and our understanding of the nature of the universe as we know it.

You don't even want to know about my mega steel.
Click to expand...

I wanna know about. Whats it called?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top