Wear resistance of 15n20

S

skillgannon

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Apr 27, 2009
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I have been putting in some hours hand sanding blades and it really seams like the 15n20 is much harder to sand than the 1084. Has anyone else noticed that? If so why ? I thought all the nickel did was make it tougher.
 
Do you know the hardness of each sample? We tend to run 15n20 two Rc points harder than 1084 in most cases. That said, I’ve found that 15n20 performs better than its chemistry suggests it should. I even asked Kevin Cashen about it a few years ago, and his thoughts were that running it harder might explain the difference. I was comparing 15n20 at Rc62 to O1 at Rc60. His other suggestion was that I hadn’t optimized my O1 heat treat as well as I did with 15n20.
 
I am doing the same heat treatment in my simple little atlas forge and canola oil. The two steels that I always get good results with are 1084 and 15n20 . I'm am doing various knives and the 15n20 on average is tempered harder but some blades are the same (350) . When I compare my 1084 knives to any 1095 knives like Becker or Esse my 1084 is MUCH harder and everyone who I have given knives to likes it. But the 15n20 seems to be much more wear resistant . I like it for the thin stock and resistance to rusting. Doing a pile of full flat ground blades you can start to count the sheets of sandpaper that you go through . I have a little 7" santuko that will take almost as much work as a 12" bowie.
 
I think it's way better than 1084. I am getting 61.5 to 62.5 with my wish and a prayer heat treat. I have made a pile of mules and everyone loves the performance. I wish I could get some at 1/4" or even .300". I'm interested in finding out if any of the charpies show anything interesting. If they don't what's the take home? Is it when you are told a steel is tough you run it hard? A kinda steel placebo.
 
With my equipment I'm getting 62 rc tempering at 350. That's after 10 min at 1465. It was harder than I expected. Before I had a hardness tester I was tempering at 325, but I decided to bump the temp up.
62 is my sweet spot.
Everyone's equipment is different, you may be getting higher hardness than you think.
 
To the point of the question, I haven't noticed 15n20 to be harder to sand/more wear resistant than 1084 or 1095 at a given hardness (usually I run them 62-63hrc). But that's a subjective statement to some degree I suppose. It is a great steel, one of those whose performance seems to be greater than what you would expect just by looking at it's chemistry composition. That 2% nickel really makes it tough, so you can use it hard at low edge angles and have really nice apex stability.
 
Ive got a big 250mm chef knife waiting to be ground @ RC 63-64. This is the uddelholm stuff from JT....cant wait to try it. ill be follwing this thread and maybe add to it.
 
Let me know how that turns out. I have a pile of steel from JT as well. I can't wait to be able to fine tune my heat treatment . I have the money set aside for it but don't want to spend until work picks up for summer.
The difference in hand sanding isn't huge but seemed odd since some of the blades were tempered in the same batch.
timos- said:
Ive got a big 250mm chef knife waiting to be ground @ RC 63-64. This is the uddelholm stuff from JT....cant wait to try it. ill be follwing this thread and maybe add to it.
Click to expand...

What kind of heat treatment did you do to get that hardness. That's gotta be a low temper. I wouldn't mind doing a test blade like that.
 
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