Who knows the HRC of Cold Steel GI Tanto?

[Bigfattyt]

I found this thread because I was wondering about the 1055 steel in my Cold steel Barong Machete.

I was hoping to find out if anyone had any experiance with the durability and strength of the machete (my Dad's old machete was pretty soft but that was the 70's and who knows what it was).

This is from the Cold Steel site:
1055 steel is right on the border between a medium and a high carbon steel, with a carbon content between 0.50%-0.60% and with manganese between 0.60%-0.90% as the only other component. The carbon content and lean alloy make this a shallow hardening steel with a quenched hardness between Rc 60-64 depending on exact carbon content. These combination of factors make this one of the toughest steels available because, when quenched, it produces a near saturated lathe martensite with no excess carbides, avoiding the brittleness of higher carbon materials. This steel is particularly suited to applications where strength and impact resistance is valued above all other considerations and will produce blades of almost legendary toughness.

So I was interested if anyone has used the Cold Steel machetes and found the statement about strength and impact resistance to be the case or at least satisfied in the performance.

The only CS machetes I have used were the Kukri versions, which seemed stiffer than other machetes I have used. I think they might be a thicker machete than others on the site.

 

[3Guardsmen]

I wish I could remember where I read it (I'd post the link if I could), but I do recall reading that their 1055 is somewhere around 52-54 RC.

Pretty sure that was in their ad copy for the Bushman, which uses SK-5, not 1055.

 

[3Guardsmen]

Cold steel Bushman/SK-5 link.