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  1. #106
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    Quote Originally Posted by ian View Post

    as far as I know, the use of high speed steels in hand tools dates back to the mid to late 1990s.
    I don't think the use of HSS would be classed as "common" even today. HSS being the alloys used by Veritas and Lie Nielsen.
    .
    At times it is best to step back from the mystique building marketing that these guys use.

    They have a way of implying that some of their processes and materials are a revolutionary advance.

    Reminds me of golf equipment marketing. Find a point of difference and charge $$$ for it.

    Different variants of HSS have been test driven around the block in cold work applications for pretty much the whole 117 years they've existed. For more than half of that time they have been successfully used in some expensive end of the market hand tools, notably chisels and knives.

    HSS variants will move the exact point we sit in the metal properties trade off to different places on the scale (often simplisticly summarised as time taken to sharpen versus time between sharpenings).

    But the question then and now remains. Does the movement of that point equate to "better"?

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  3. #107
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    I always thought that D2 was an example of going a bit too far along the hardness axis, making it very tough to sharpen/grind? Didn't Iles make a pigsticker mortise chisel out of D2 at one time?

    You're also forgetting the Chinese range of HSS such as C1, C2, C3, etc. (where C is the percentage of cheese in the recipe....)

  4. #108
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  5. #109
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    ... the resins are where you can easily harvest aromadendrin from, due to occurrence factors. Resins are a potentially correlational attribution, and attributions may be drawn, however you might want to go to evidence samples first.
    Cheers,
    Clinton

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  6. #110
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    Quote Originally Posted by goodvibes View Post
    But the question then and now remains. Does the movement of that point equate to "better"?
    that introduces the early-to-late adopter (from marketing) equation.
    Cheers,
    Clinton

    "Use your third eye" - Watson

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/clinton_findlay/

  7. #111
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Brush View Post
    .....You're also forgetting the Chinese range of HSS such as C1, C2, C3, etc. (where C is the percentage of cheese in the recipe....)
    Hmm, I've now got several Mujingfang blades mr. B., and I have to say they give a very good account of themselves. One of them is listed as being M2, but whatever they are, they take a good edge & keep it plenty long enough to be useful. At half the price or less of equivalent after-market blades from other makers, I'm not complainin'.......

    Cheers,
    IW

  8. #112
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Brush View Post
    Nice chisels - not that hard to sharpen and hold up well. Brent Beach's page gives a good account of what D2 looks like after it's been used a little bit, but the kind of chunky edge that it keeps doesn't deter much in terms of cutting mortises.

    Wouldn't want the same steel in a plane iron, though. Half or quarter as good as the strange fine-grained HSS that mujingfang uses.

  9. #113
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    Quote Originally Posted by ian View Post
    as far as I know, the use of high speed steels in hand tools dates back to the mid to late 1990s.
    There have been HSS irons for quite a while, but they never caught on. I managed to finally get a hold of a good one (for a decent price) earlier this year, marked "revilo high speed steel" and made in the early to early-mid 1900s.

    The difference between it and modern HSS irons is that it's finer grained (don't know what it is, if it's a tungsten class of HSS - it's probably something that would be more expensive than M2, which IIRC was developed as a lower cost alternative to tungsten HSS). It's also (this is important) a little bit softer than modern HSS irons, and it works fabulously - I'd never know it wasn't a carbon steel iron in sharpening it. The fineness and the more typical vintage hardness level (high 50s to possibly 60, I'd guess) makes it sharpenable on anything. It didn't have an obnoxious tough wire edge like M2, either.

    I'm sure that the hardness would prevent it from holding that sort of "oh, it's kind of sharp, but not that sharp" edge that M2 holds for a long time in abrasive materials, though.

  10. #114
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    (those irons, by the way, the HSS irons, sold in fairly large numbers given what they were. Not large numbers compared to any main line manufacturer. There just never was much of a market for them until amateurs got into woodworking, despite there being plenty of work done historically in really hard woods like ebony and various rosewoods. If you work long enough with hand tools only, you kind of figure out why that was - how you use the plane, and how you sharpen is more important than the iron being super whiz-bang, and the tradeoffs in "wundersteel" don't beat a good carbon steel iron).

  11. #115
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    As a practical matter - for most folks - sharpening limits how far afield you can go on alloys.. It doesn't matter what the blacksmith and foundry can make if you can't sharpen it in the field or in the workshop.... No doubt that is what these guys always ran into... Sure - they had no trouble making high speed steel and super alloy irons and even sharpening them initially on industrial diamond/CBN/ and specialized soft Alumina wheels at the factory... But they all came back because nobody could sharpen them on the conventional media available to "normal people"....

    And diamond really hasn't come into super widespread use until the last 10 or 15 years.. Now everybody has a diamond folding EZ-Lap in their kitchen drawer and another in their fishing tacklebox... I remember seeing ceramic sharpening stones for the first time in the early 1990's..... I was amazed at how well they cut and had to have one...

    And now - I sharpen a D2 or 440C knife on my diamond plates and think "What's the big deal".. But I remember how proud I was of my first 440c knife and how frustrated I was because I just couldn't get any sort of sharp edge on it after hours of work on Conventional stones.. That knife is still sitting in a drawer - I probably need to give it another go now that I have diamond sharpening stuff..

  12. #116
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    This could morph into yet another "sharpening thread", but I think D.W. has pointed to the nub of the matter. Without getting into a debate about when the steels we think of as 'highspeed steels' were first available to woodworkers, I think we can all agree that there is a trade-off between hardness & what you can sharpen with practicality in the average workshop. Over the 50 years I've been woodworking, I've come round in a bit of a circle on blade hardness. My first 30 years or so were spent on a quest for ever-harder & tougher blades, but in the last 10 years or so, I've switched to a more nuanced approach. I've got a couple of very hard irons that hold their edge better in woods like Gidgee & She-oak than any of my more 'regular' irons, & I'm grateful to have them at times, but most of my bench planes carry Hock O1s or similar. The reason is that they do a perfectly good job on the more 'sensible' woods I normally select for cabinetmaking, yet are very easy to sharpen well. Despite the advertising blurbs, the harder blades do not take as good an edge as easily, in my hands, & I suspect many others have had the same experience. You can get a usable edge on PMV11 with oilstones, but it's not super-good, & takes a lot more time & effort than I'm prepared to give to the task.

    The HSS Bailey-type irons produced in Tasmania back in the 70s (no idea what the compositions was - does anyone know for sure?), were a boon because they did hold an edge longer than 'regular' Stanley or Record irons in our abrasive woods yet were still easy to sharpen with regular 'India' or Carborundum oilstones. Fast-forward to the last 10 years or so, with an increasing number of manufacturers offering harder steels and I think a lot of people are discovering that the old sharpening media don't cut it, so to speak.

    As with just about everything in life, there are compromises to be reached, so when it comes to plane irons, I suggest you weigh up the pluses & minus. If you always plane very hard, abrasive woods, then go for the toughest steels you can lay your hands on, but if you mostly work with woods no harder than say, E. regnans, you might find more middling steels suit you better. You will sharpen a few more times, perhaps, but because it's easy, I reckon you'll spend more time working with a truly sharp blade than a half-sharp one!

    Cheers,
    IW

  13. #117
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    Ian

    You make good points with the typically used cabinet timbers. Australia is probably close to unique in our access to difficult and/or extremely hard and abrasive timbers. We absolutely should be making the qualification of "for most normal purpose."

    Regards
    Paul
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  14. #118
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    The vast majority of North American woods can be worked like various grades of hard cheeses.

    I had no more than 4 years experience with Australian woods and that was a lesson which I have not forgotten.
    The simple act of taking an axe to a block to split firewood.

    Our birch (Betula papyrifera) is a featureless wood for furniture carcass construction and wood carving.
    I have a Stanley Bailey #5. A few passes on 1,500 grit at 30*, reassemble and it sings in the wood.

  15. #119
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    You know Ian, our sharpening discussions have come a LONG way since I first heard an old timer curse the living daylights out of 440C knife and throw it into a lake.. No doubt the same thing happened when a crusty old fellow tried to sharpen his New High Speed Steel iron on his trusty sharpening brick - and the dull iron wore a nice groove into the brick.. And was still dull... I bet that fancy iron is still laying in the bottom of some billabong outback... ...

    Back in The Days of Yore (you know.. The 1990's... Ancient history... I hear Rome was still a thing.. But I digress. ) - there was hardly anything besides Arkansas and India stones in common use in the USA... Probably various flavors of natural (mostly silica based) stones everywhere else.... That and the ubiquitous coarse Corondum stone...

    And the common street knowledge was not really out there about the why's and wherefores about what was going on and how come these new steels "Take a horrible edge and hold it forever"... Nobody talked about Vanadium, Tungsten, Chromium, and Molybdinum carbides... Grain size wasn't a big point of discussion... Regular folks buying knives and chisels didn't really understand there was a bunch of stuff in the steel that was a LOT harder than their stones - and as a result these carbides just scratched up the stone for a while till the steel around it wore off and then it popped out - leaving a raggedy hole behind.... No microscope pictures of steels sharpened on various different media on The Internet to look at..... No common knowledge that if you switch to Alumina - you at least have a shot at it... (Corondum stones were for axes and sandpaper was for wood..). And there was no diamond stone to make sharpening these intractable steels go pretty well.....

    At least now - we have a better shot at heading people in the right direction with somewhat useful reasoning behind it.. We don't always succeed - but at least we have the tools now..

  16. #120
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    Quote Originally Posted by truckjohn View Post
    .......Back in The Days of Yore (you know.. The 1990's... Ancient history... there was hardly anything besides Arkansas and India stones in common use in the USA... Probably various flavors of natural (mostly silica based) stones everywhere else.... That and the ubiquitous coarse Corondum stone...
    Hmm, the 1990s seem like pretty recent history to this old phart, TJ!

    Actually, it's all very curious & complicated, this sharpening business. As far as the abrasive material used, nothing much has changed since the very early 1900s. Natural stones of novaculite (like Arkansas etc.) contain Silicon dioxide as their cutting material - that's just glass and though it's harder than steel, it struggles to deal with the very hard ones. My understanding is that has much to do with the shear-strength of the particles.

    The two most-commonly-used materials in synthetic stone are Silicon carbide (patented in 1893) which has been used under various tradenames since the early 1900s (Corundum, Carborundum, etc.) and Aluminium dioxide ('India' stones etc.). These stones use a ceramic binder that is fired at high temperature to give the desired hardness. The same compounds form the active ingredient in synthetic water stones, which use binders fired at much lower temps so they are relatively soft. Despite using the same abrasive, there is no comparison in the way Carborundum or India stones cut hard steels compared with my Ohishi water stone! So the choice is between a soft binder, which allows quick-cutting but rapid surface wear of the 'stone', or a hard binder that cuts slowly but holds its shape for a very long time - almost as long as it takes to put an edge on M2, etc. Why can't we ever get a free lunch?! ...

    Cheers,
    IW

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