Carbon is cheaper and much easier for the maker, for an inferior product for the customer, all under the positive guise of "old school" or "tradition", what's not to love?
Jay Fisher:
"There are even web sites claiming that only standard carbon steel blades should be used for swords, and sadly, this ignorance of what constitutes a fine blade is prevalent in many sources, both in digital and print media. Just as in fine knives, fine, high alloy martensitic stainless and other high alloy tool steels are absolutely the best for any knife, whether it is a small utility tool, a medium sized hunting knife, a large kitchen knife, a stout tactical knife, a khukri with a sixteen inch long blade, or a full sized rapier with a forty-four inch (110 cm) long blade. A simple question then, would be why these fine steels are not commonly mentioned or recommended? Most people do not even know that a sword can be made of, for example, 440C high chromium martensitic tool steel. Many of these self-proclaimed reference sources have never even seen a blade of fine stainless tool steel and they are still stuck in the past wives' tales of how all stainless steel is bad."
Bernard Levine:
"I have owned about 10,000 antique kitchen and butcher knives, and examined perhaps 20 times that number. I have found that good quality modern stainless steel knives, when properly sharpened, are superior in use to all older knives, even the very best. Stainless steel knives can be made at least as sharp as carbon steel ones, they stay sharp many times longer, and of course, they do not stain... the president of a major knife company put it very well when he said to me that preferring carbon steel knives over stainless steel ones is like preferring vacuum tube radios over transistor ones."
--Bernard Levine, Levine's Guide to Knives, 1985
The funny thing is... Back when diamond hones were rare, stainless steels were all the rage, precisely when they were hard to sharpen without deforming the coarse stones while re-profiling... Any "tactical knife" worth its salt back then was stainless... When that meant a dull stone re-profile by hand... Now that we have diamond hones, and that Carbon steels are about as obsolete as the flintlock rifle, MOST of what we get, just at precisely the moment we stopped needing it, are Carbon steel production tactical/bushcraft knives...
We needed today's 1095 Esees, Tops, Ontario and Beckers forty years ago, and we would badly need some of the old 440C/Aus-8 stuff today... Weird world...
Jay Fisher once more on the toughness advantages of stainless:
"High tensile strength. Specifically, this is the maximum load that a steel can bear without stretching permanently. This is typically the strength factor of steel that is critical to making a steel choice. How different are the stainless tool steels than standard carbon steels? Incredibly different. The tensile strength of 1025 standard carbon steel is 440 MPa (megapascals) or 63,816 pounds per square inch. This seems enormous, but remember that many hundreds or perhaps thousands of PSI of pressure are applied to the microscopic cutting edge. The strength of 440C high chromium martensitic tool steel? How about 2030 MPa (294,426 PSI), over four and a half times stronger! "
This is why you see so much fewer broken stainless knives if you do a simple google search, even for the cheap Chinese crap mystery stainless...
This is also why differential tempering helps carbon blades from falling apart, while stainless just keeps going with a single hardness throughout... Just Cold Steel alone should open anyone's eyes: Unlike most Esee, Ontario or Beckers blades, they have made the same blade designs in both stainless and carbon blades, and you can find a plethora of the carbon stuff broken, and very little of the stainless... Most common on the stainless are half-moon chunks of the edge, which indicates prying with the edge stuck, the easiest way by far to cause a failure...
I don't know how things ever got so upside down, but there you go...
Gaston
Jay Fisher:
"There are even web sites claiming that only standard carbon steel blades should be used for swords, and sadly, this ignorance of what constitutes a fine blade is prevalent in many sources, both in digital and print media. Just as in fine knives, fine, high alloy martensitic stainless and other high alloy tool steels are absolutely the best for any knife, whether it is a small utility tool, a medium sized hunting knife, a large kitchen knife, a stout tactical knife, a khukri with a sixteen inch long blade, or a full sized rapier with a forty-four inch (110 cm) long blade. A simple question then, would be why these fine steels are not commonly mentioned or recommended? Most people do not even know that a sword can be made of, for example, 440C high chromium martensitic tool steel. Many of these self-proclaimed reference sources have never even seen a blade of fine stainless tool steel and they are still stuck in the past wives' tales of how all stainless steel is bad."
Bernard Levine:
"I have owned about 10,000 antique kitchen and butcher knives, and examined perhaps 20 times that number. I have found that good quality modern stainless steel knives, when properly sharpened, are superior in use to all older knives, even the very best. Stainless steel knives can be made at least as sharp as carbon steel ones, they stay sharp many times longer, and of course, they do not stain... the president of a major knife company put it very well when he said to me that preferring carbon steel knives over stainless steel ones is like preferring vacuum tube radios over transistor ones."
--Bernard Levine, Levine's Guide to Knives, 1985
The funny thing is... Back when diamond hones were rare, stainless steels were all the rage, precisely when they were hard to sharpen without deforming the coarse stones while re-profiling... Any "tactical knife" worth its salt back then was stainless... When that meant a dull stone re-profile by hand... Now that we have diamond hones, and that Carbon steels are about as obsolete as the flintlock rifle, MOST of what we get, just at precisely the moment we stopped needing it, are Carbon steel production tactical/bushcraft knives...
We needed today's 1095 Esees, Tops, Ontario and Beckers forty years ago, and we would badly need some of the old 440C/Aus-8 stuff today... Weird world...
Jay Fisher once more on the toughness advantages of stainless:
"High tensile strength. Specifically, this is the maximum load that a steel can bear without stretching permanently. This is typically the strength factor of steel that is critical to making a steel choice. How different are the stainless tool steels than standard carbon steels? Incredibly different. The tensile strength of 1025 standard carbon steel is 440 MPa (megapascals) or 63,816 pounds per square inch. This seems enormous, but remember that many hundreds or perhaps thousands of PSI of pressure are applied to the microscopic cutting edge. The strength of 440C high chromium martensitic tool steel? How about 2030 MPa (294,426 PSI), over four and a half times stronger! "
This is why you see so much fewer broken stainless knives if you do a simple google search, even for the cheap Chinese crap mystery stainless...
This is also why differential tempering helps carbon blades from falling apart, while stainless just keeps going with a single hardness throughout... Just Cold Steel alone should open anyone's eyes: Unlike most Esee, Ontario or Beckers blades, they have made the same blade designs in both stainless and carbon blades, and you can find a plethora of the carbon stuff broken, and very little of the stainless... Most common on the stainless are half-moon chunks of the edge, which indicates prying with the edge stuck, the easiest way by far to cause a failure...
I don't know how things ever got so upside down, but there you go...
Gaston
As for choosing 1095, i suspect for many of the manufacturers that you mentioned is it an issue of cost, not only for materials but for processing including heat treatment,.
