Do you know what hardness Kershaw is hardening their 13C26 to?
I have seen it noted as low as 55-57 HRC, that is even soft for 12C27M. The $5 stainless Mora's are harder.
Do you have any idea how many complaints from customers we get concerning edge retention? How bout positive performance responses, do you know how many of those we get?
I would assume few of the former and a lot of the latter. There are in general very few negative reviews of any knives on this forum for example outside of the black listed products like DarkOps. You really don't want to use user group feedback in such a way if you are seriously interested in meaningful data.
How many users have complained about one of your knives but praised the 13C26 ones. Have you done any blind testing, given a user group a sample of unknown blades and asked for feedback? There is more of course you can do but these are some of the basic statistical methods you need to apply.
Cliff, do you know we work closely with Sandvik? You must not think much of their HT advice.
As for production references, the heat treatment of D2 published in industry standards gives a very coarse grain fracture size. However it can be made quite fine with proper time/temperature. You don't want to blindly advocate "industry does it so it has to be optimal". What are the inherent compromises? Are they the tradeoffs that are ideal for your products? Can you put more money into the process because you have the ability to work in a lower performance/cost ratio? Landes has described an optimal heat treatment of 13C26 to produce maximal edge stability so you can use that as a reference. It is quite involved though and likely the cost is simply too high outside of true customs.
As an aside for those interested, he also still makes knives. I thought he just did it while he was doing his metallurgy research. I am definately getting one from him and it will be up for a pass around assuming I can let go of it for awhile. I think I might get Roman to harden a small blank for Alvin to redo his Bos ATS-34 vs 1095 comparison. If I do that I'll definately pick up one of Kershaws and have Alvin regrind that as well for another reference point though at that hardness it would be hard to convince him to do it and the edge will likely just blow out directly.
Repeat after me, "chrome is bad for knife blades".
Only in large quantities, it does good things in small amounts. You just don't want to make it the primary carbide former unless of course you don't care about edge stability and just want high wear resistance, the D series steels for example.
I've got a Cyclone (large) in 13C26 from kershaw, and my only complaint was the original edge geometry.
Yeah, the design is the complete opposite of the focus of the steel so that is a bit of a problem obviously. I would be really curious if Sandvik actually recommended that profile for the steel because it directly contradicts Landes research.
Since I reprofiled it, it cuts like a demon, and I'm afraid that I'm the reason that Kel_aa had issues with the steel. He was the first to get it after the reprofiling, and I'd left a wire edge on there.
He sharpened it himself, one of his issues was with how poorly it responded to sharpening :
The steel I did not have a very good experience with. I found it very difficult to deburr using a Sharpmaker. Using some CrO loaded cardboard helps to align the edge, but it generally results in wire-edges that would roll. I found this a fairly difficult piece to work with, certainly not something I would seek out over many of the others I've worked with.
That was what I meant by being the heat treatment and not the steel. 13C26 is designed for minimal burr formation, the above is like complaining that 420HC had low corrosion resistance, that isn't the steel's problem. It is by design a razor blade steel so using it with tactical edge geometries makes no sense. In those geometries you would use a steel with a lower edge stability and take advantage of the higher wear resistance.
-Cliff
