What do you say when smiths make claims like this?????

[Will52100]

No problem, at first I was thinking it was the thermal cycles alone. I did do some testing with just thermal cycling and it helped, but seems to be with some steels that a combination of forging and thermal cycling makes a difference. I haven't tried a lot of different steels, but it seems to work well with 52100 and 5160, though it may or may not make a noticeable change in others. I have little to no improvement from the simpler steels like 1084. Would also add that the addition of a digital oven helped make it easier to get consistent results as well, instead of wondering why one blade didn't quite cut as well as the next.