Thread: Hitachi White 1A Steel

David, your search for the perfect chisel is becoming obsessional - won't "excellent" do?

You're right, there's a fairly wide range in commercial products as far as hardness & toughness are concerned, and user tolerance would cover an even wider range, methinks, but as for any tool, there is probably no such thing as a "perfect" chisel. You may get the steel 'perfect' (for a range of specified tasks), but what about the shape/weight/balance/handle? Preferences for these vary even more widely!

But then Wilbur & Orville were assured by the experts that their machine could never fly, so keep at it....

Cheers,

The closest thing I ever found to perfect was English bench chisels with a tang. You can hold them by the handle, point them wherever they need to go and strike them, and they're long enough to do most small integral paring and cleaning jobs far faster than moving to get paring chisels, for example.

So, that's what I make. I think it's not a coincidence that the style was vastly preferred when people were using chisels for much more than cleaning up after power tool work starts and does half or more of the job.

Most of the market out there now is people who want to do something after some kind of router method or whatever else, looking for "butt" chisels or half length parers. I do what I can to avoid all of that or having someone who just took two classes at marc adams tell me what the best chisel is.

The real market in selling to most of what's out there now is making something just a little different or just a little more shiny, delivering it with someone else doing most of the work in subcontracted steps like some of the saw makers and blue spruce do it, and selling the tools to people who are afraid to touch them because they don't want to make a mark.

If I ever make chisels for pay, it'll be like henry ford and japanning on cars. "here's our version of white paint - it's white with lamp black. Trust us, it's white, you just can't see it".

of course I have had a few people ask if I'll make something other than what I make with offers to trade something unusual. I will make seaton chisels but that's about as far as I'll go. Most of the rest want to know if I'll make socket chisels and of course everyone says they'd like to buy a set of paring chisels, because everyone loves to have the oddball stuff. Must be some kind of natural preference for rare things - like a mating ritual with chisels, except I don't know who the target is.

I'm, of course, still trying to slowly move toward really nailing the English stuff. You can kind of go to the bench with a set of the chisels and cut everything other than mortises with them. The paring chisels and butts and so on end up being a waste of time to even try to get out.

Of course, I felt like I needed a bunch of gadget sets when I started woodworking. First to pinch the blade when malleting dovetails, then parers (boy were they hard to find, and the narex ones were sort of like mowing the lawn with a string trimmer - they would do in a pinch, but you don't want to have them if you're going to do much lawn mowing. They were soft and fat), and then I finally managed to get a set of English chisels and pinching chisels made my fingers hurt and I got tired of it and set to be able to use chisels holding the handle and never taking either hand off of a handle (mallet or chisel) and it was kind of an epiphany.

After that, it's been a matter of keeping the edges in good enough shape one way or another so that you can go back and forth between malleting and paring.

Courtesy of the 115crv3 not working like I'd have expected (I'm not sure it's actually even 115crv3), I'm back to W1 for now, and can only go up the ladder if applying the bolster with a forge weld.

the rest of the "YMMV market" is free to go on as it is - I'd have to consider it if needing to make a living, but I'd also have to consider some kind of cheesy design like the Veritas or worse...blue spruce chisels. That's just my opinion - not formed out of some kind of sports team like bias, but rather with disappointment in how we've gone from something to something else for, I guess, scalability and ability to use unskilled labor in the making. the price isn't less, though. I could match LV's price, make a better chisel and make a decent side income. I'd have to be single to make a living, though.

none of that should be confused with someone thinking "I shouldn't just take a piece of bar stock and stuff it in a handle and wrap a ferrule around the end to keep the handle from splitting".

I think people should always take an opportunity if time and interest allows to make a tool. I got way past the point where building chisels was just to get what I want. When I got parks 50 and figured out how to thermally cycle 26c3, and forge weld a bolster on, that was already over at that point. A set of file chisels that I made for someone before that (welded bolsters) that I though just looked a bit too thin at the tang are the bench chisels that I have - not even the "good ones".

I'm just not into the "well, nothing is perfect". We shouldn't worry about whether or not someone else likes a different style. I don't. I don't think Glen Drake is going to make a better mallet or hammer, or Titemark is going to change the world with a cutting gauge over a knife, pin and older wheel gauge. A lot of people will - I think they should like what they like. I never felt the rope pull to the shop like I do now when going through all of those things, though.

I hope my love for the English style chisels doesn't encourage someone who already doesn't like them to question what they think and go out and buy another set. Or if someone just loves the teats off of a set of V11 chisels, they know all they need to know. I was highly disappointed with them when they were put up against two chisels that cost a fraction of what they did and couldn't stand up to either, but not everyone will be that worried about comparing. It wasn't until I learned more about steel later when making chisels that I found out why the V11 results were "just OK" which made me even a little more irritated that I paid $112 with tax for the chisel that I tested and probably netted $65 off of dumping it on ebay.

The only time I really roll eyes is when the "if they had what we have in the 1800s, they'd use our stuff" when that reference is to A2 and butt chisels and so on. We arrived where we are because it can cut skill out of the making process and not make the local factory go into crisis if successful marketing doubles the order volume. A good example of this in knives is Ontario here - which was one of few knife makers left making knives out of carbon steel. Some guy consulted for them and developed a process to thermal cycle plain steel, though it did involve a skilled person doing it on a high volume level, I'm sure they had fixtures the same way dovo does making razors. Eventually, they parted ways wanting to modernize the operation, which caused them to have problems heat treating the steel they used for their knives, and they switched to 1075, which isn't as good as CarbonV, but they compared their results to 1075 in the present, rather than comparing 1075 to results they could've had if they hadn't ditched them. And ultimately, they closed their doors recently because someone bought the factory for the brand anyway. Who knows what'll happen - will they contract make knives in the US, or will someone just make soft knives out of 8cr13Mov or whatever it is and stamp them with ontario.

The steel thing in europe is another interesting one. the DIN and old conventions naming things are more instructive than what we have.

W1 replaced what we'd referred to as cast steel, or some variant of it, then O1 and A2 quickly followed in the first quarter of the last century, though A2 may not have been called A2 until a little after that (maybe 1940).

W1 is a lot harder to heat treat than O1 and moves more, and A2 compared to O1 is the same, but there is still a love in tool and die shops for making quick tools out of O1. Maybe that's a cost thing.

DIN & W-Nr Steel Specifications - Special steel china supplier-OTAI Special Steel

The Carbon tool steel list on the left is sort of like a wish list for me. C130 (which may be another name for C125W) is apparently one of the steels used in older nicholson files. This list says these steels are no longer in use. That may be true as a supply item, but I'd be surprised if some version of them doesn't still exist in file making. however, I also have to admit that there is something different about grinding old files on a belt grinder. They smoke like a train and the spark pattern is a ball of combustion. It's dreamy aside from the fact that the smoke is monstrously unhealth. I would love some of the C-W series steels with >1% carbon. it's unsurprisingly similar to hitachi white 1 except P and S can be slightly higher (but they may not be).

the write up at Otai mentions issues with breaking toughness, something we don't have much of an issue with on chisels, but whack an old hammer with a file and you'll find that they do break quite easily. that can be addressed with hand heat treatment.

26c3 is basically 125cr1 with a tighter spec. that's still made, and you can probably get it in rounds somewhere. I have a bar and a sheet of it to try yet, but haven't. 3/8ths thickness is the biggest I can get and that still excludes integral bolsters except of the Veritas type (side only...). No thanks.

The market for knives is small, but it's gotten big enough as a hobby thing here that you can get things like 26c3 in bars, but 0.1-0.15 would be much more popular than even .25".

(well, I'm wrong fortunately!! otai says they offer C130 but only in limited stock. The instructions for heat treatment are humorous - they're afraid of it but they are making suggestions for commercial operations where an orange steel dunker may not be enthusiastic on a tuesday afternoon).

I don't often wish I lived in europe, but when it comes to getting simple tool steels in round bars, I do wish I had a clone over there to order and ship back to here.

Most of the "Gone" stuff went away when the mill making it closed. The story I've heard is that most of the shops making woodworking edge tools are pretty small. They aren't big enough to buy an entire heat of steel, so they try to buy as much of one lot as they can, and then tailor their process to getting the best out of that lot. Then, when they have to buy another pile, it's back to the process drawing board to make sure they can get equivalent performance out of it. Say you're Lee Valley and your PMV11 chisels shoot the moon. 100,000 lbs of flat stock suddenly turns into 1-year of sales, and you're scrambling for stock.

I've heard much the same out of Hitachi White #1. It apparently hasn't been made in a while. The way it ends up on the market is that a Japanese smith retires/dies and his steel stock is sold off. That's probably also why it never ends up outside of Japan... You gotta get yours from a smith who bought his pile in the 1970's.

Same for small lots of weird tool steel alloys... Say a plant closes and has 500 lbs of C130 rolled strip for file stock. A commercial forge operation has no use for a lot that small, but the hobby knife steel suppliers know it's the best thing in the world for a guy who wants to make a dozen knives or chisels.

Even the commercially available small lot tool steel is sort of like this. Somebody like Starrett buys one heat of O1, uses a pile in their own tools, and then sells the rest into the industrial supply catalog market for 30+ years.

And so it goes.

That may be what happened with your "115CRV3". It may have been a small consignment lot somebody bought out of a plant closure, and then it turned out it wasn't actually that.

Anything could happen, it could be like fruit. I don't think hitachi white 1 and blue 1 are limited, though I've heard more than once an association of makers in a japanese region will go together on buying steel. Where the story gets more specific is a claim of having an older "special blade steel" without ever specifying what it is, and knowing that the steel isn't something that is definitely out of commission like the Andrews steels. i think a lot of that kind of thing - getting a special melt, or claiming to - is to create he illusion of scarcity. the same as talking about the loss of the supply of the best wrought. Stu thought that was humorous because there is wrought basically coming out of peoples' ears as scrap from rebuilds. It's less common here, but I don't know if that's a matter of lack of distribution or history vs. japan.

Most of the woodworking tool suppliers don't need to buy a melt. My understanding is that Lee Valley may be getting a melt of XHP done to be able to sell their "V11", but probably still by carpenter. What I know less about the making of the stuff is that carpenter is obviously still around, but they lost interest in making the steel available so that it's a stock item. I bought a couple of XHP bars early this year or last year because they showed up on carpenter's drops (leftovers) page and I thought they were a stock item. I don't care for it in tools at this point, but it's nice to have to make a semi-stainless knife. the desire to differentiate instead of just improving A2 to match LNs and increasing the quality of the O1, which would make a chisel that matches V11, but one that maybe isn't quite as easy to industrially heat treat at high hardness - has created a situation where LV is stuck waiting for their turn if I gather how the industry works.

Anyway, back to the drops of XHP - it seems carpenter isn't interested in it, though they're still around and not going anywhere. if spyderco decided to buy a melt, they'd make it, but spyderco does what spyderco wants and most of the other volume knife makers aren't going to touch it due to cost and the fact that it only makes sense to use it when it's at its upper hardness range. But I do have one clue as to what probably spelled its end...it was sold as a powdered stainless, but the carbon occupies a lot of the chromium and it stains easily in food and will rust if not dried off. Not like a carbon steel, but Larrin mentioned that staining on knives is one of two things that will result in a lot of people making returns. There just aren't enough real enthusiasts out there to differentiate it from S35Vn and care. it's a finer edge steel than S35Vn, but the knife world isn't about that too much.

Which leads to 80crv2 - it's made in droves for some reason. All over europe. Larrin mentioned that it's popularly used in european woodworking tools, but its availability goes beyond that. I think its key to success is it doesn't break easily and doesn't have enough carbon to form embrittlement issues with plate martensite. That's probably also the same thing that keeps manufacture of O1 below 1% carbon (much more often 0.9%). Whatever the case, like O1, A2, if a manufacturer wants to use it, they don't have to do anything but make orders. O1 and A2 are used for a multitude of things here that have nothing to do with tools, and have been for around a century - slightly less for A2. they're good for machine shops, and cheap die making where something spectacular isn't needed.

C130 can also be ordered still. I think the lack of interest in it is from the manufacturer's side. Nicholson's files come up short vs. their 1950s files, but their customers probably don't care - if they did, it'd still be made. it's cheap to make, but the cold work tool steel is tended mower toward something like (legitimate) 115crv3, which is deeper hardening. Supposedly. I'd ask cooper what they make their files out of now, but I seriously doubt they'll tell me. The next time throwing away a thicker foreign made nicholson file is in order, I'll break it and see what I can find. But I think regardless of what I see, the lack of off the rack availability of C130 isn't because it can't be made - it's because there's no customer. The world of knives (which is thriving, but still a small industry, even at the production level in the US) can't manage to keep anything that's not new in stock, so we don't have a chance at all for woodworking.

Comparing something like 80crv2 to an addis tool or the number of addis tools george mentioned rehardening suggests to me that whatever slight increase in potential there was using water hardening steel, the tools were often delivered undertempered and overhard. If pfeil can use off the rack steel and manage to get it closer to 62, and it's not chippy (it isn't), I'd never find a shortcoming with it.

it's an interesting thing to think about - who are the real customers driving what we can get off the rack and not get off of the rack. You or I could buy 115crv3 all day for 30 cents a pound from china. It's stocked everywhere in europe - a lot of the din steels are in stock in suppliers in droves, but not here. there are still a bunch of specialty steel suppliers here on the outskirts of pittsburgh. There's still a good bit of steel actually made here, and engineering products- just not in the middle of the city and the inexpensive ingot stuff is probably going to soon be gone. I'd bet I could go to one of the counters at the suppliers and get just about anything of the din type if willing to order it by the ton. Of course, I'm not.

Because I've bought carpenter's drops, I actually get the marketing communication from sb metals (a storefront for a lot of carpenter's stuff), and they seem to be really interested these days in finding middle ground steels that are cheaper than something like XHP or powder D2, but have similar alloying. Things will keep changing. Until or unless 25 people identical to me retire, make chisel and plane irons and find a market for them, we'll not be getting carbon 130, though. And if hitachi were to start making continuous melts of white 1 and blue 1, they'd soon find the market value of it to be close to O1 steel while the other weirdo stuff like Yxr7 and some of the powder metals will always find an industrial buyer in industries where the steel is a production wear part.

I'll bet there's carbon 130 sitting somewhere on pallets in distributors who don't bother marketing it because they think there's no buyer for it.

Reminds me of George mentioning that he got a pallet of early 1900s austrian needle files at an auction. He sent me a pack in some horse trading. They are superb - better than the retailed needle files. Somehow, they found their way into storage for about 60 years because machinery probably eliminated the use of them as a consumable for more than jewelers. They're sets thought, and not individual types, so the dovetail saw filers don't need to get excited about the prospect of $1 per file austrian needle files. I hate to say it, but mine will probably find some reason to rust before they're used, and that was the fate of quite a few of the boxes on the pallet. maybe it was even the reason they were put aside.

I doubt distributors have pallets of it sitting around. More likely one or two specialty shops have a couple pallets made the 1970's that came out of a plant closure.

The trouble with sourcing tool steel is that often, "Local suppliers" don't keep much. The stuff they do keep is the common stuff tailored to their local businesses. Say for example, 4140 prehard shafting, maybe some linear bearing rod, perhaps a small supply of O1. C130 is specific and different enough that if you aren't using it, you probably won't even know what it is. Worse, you won't want it if you're making mold inserts or punch die parts.

The bigger piece which seems to be coming out of this discussion is that there is a fairly wide range of tool steels which turn out to make pretty good edge tools. The alarming part is that everything good about the alloy and carbon content can be undone with poor heat treatment. A quick "Once and done" heat treatment or a too-slow quench often yields sub-par results.

I've got some wide grain Douglas fir that I use for evaluating chisels. The rings are super hard, and the summer wood is super soft, leading to a sort of worst of all worlds which wrecks chisel edges. Combine that with paring cabinet plywood, and I can usually tell fairly quickly whether an edge will hold up or not. My default bevel prior to buffing is 25-degrees, and if it will take this, it's a good chisel.

That is definitely the case. If I were working with chisels instead of making them, I wouldn't care about the difference between W1, maybe the best of 80crv2 (though it has to be pushed into that 61.5/62 range to not get shown up on a test like you're doing, or more simply, in regular work malleting cherry or maple - lower hardness will work, but extra crispness will be noted and sometimes be the difference between yielding and not)....anyway, I wouldn't care about the differences on a small scale.

The shape and balance, and if possible, a genuine aesthetic, are pretty meaningful to me. I look at the Veritas and blue spruce chisels and see a car wreck.

LNs are OK, but the stone reminds me of pinching or having to glue sockets if you don't want to experience that holding a handle, and so on. A lot of the old English tools are divine looking, but they assume you'll have been around long enough to hold the handle and not pinch the blade. They also tend to have a balance of durability and maintenance vs. work time that a lot of modern stuff misses on, but it's covered up by 5 minute sharpening routines and lack of use.

Warren asked me at one point why I kept harping on 26c3 needing to be 63/64 (i've told this before, apologies if you remember it). He was here while I was talking to him and I think he assumed that 26c3 would be hard to sharpen because it was too hard- in fact, it isn't, but it's not often that people are exposed to a 64 hardness chisel with no alloying and they tend to confuse something like A2 at 63 for "what it's like to sharpen a chisel 63 or 64 hardness. And I kind of said to him "oh, I see what you're saying. the hardness matters to me as a maker, it wouldn't be so vital if I was thinking about using the chisels. You can use 58 or 68 and figure out how to make it work, but when you're the maker, you still just want it to be better and the focus is on making the best, not what you would tolerate when you are trying to make the best something else". that something else being some carved thing or a piece of furniture.

That reminds me - I sent warren off with two of the apple handled chisels that are in this group:
https://i.imgur.com/W5zKPXx.jpg

He used one of them for a week while working and sent me a video (pretty hard pounding). something was going on when I final ground these - they're thin. I thought I overheated them a little and I put them aside thinking they were underhard. Actually, I don't now exactly what the issue was - because I just tested one that warren took and another one and they're both 64.5 hardness half an inch from the edge. Warren said he didn't have any trouble sharpening them, but in his mind before he had these, he felt like the hardness spec was too high.

It's less of an issue of too high or not. He was able to put a heavy mallet to these in white oak in production work and they're about .07-.08" thick. They didn't chip or break or crack anything despite that and the high hardness. It's more a matter of finding the sweet spot for each.

I could've done something simple at the time such as failing to hone enough after cutting the initial bevel with extremely harsh 36 grit ceramic belts. Those are coarse enough that there is definitely some depth - perhaps a couple of thousandths - where there will be minute cracking below the grind. I always hope for a good edge right off of the grind, in this case, I guess I misled myself.....

I did just test a third narrow one and it's 62, so maybe my suspicions aren't quite so unfounded. there's zero chance that I would've heat treated them that far different, but a nonzero chance on heating one or two of the first group when figuring out how to neatly finish grind them so they are flat but also very thin. The finish thicknessing and warping is part of that. I figured that out since then. Warren got the hard one to test, but he did say he didn't think it was too hard.

The one that's 62 would not match the other two, but if you were a maker, you'd just accommodate it and it would be fine. I can't tolerate that kind of variation, but it's hard to figure out a good method without making a mistake like that.

(DF and yellow pine once dry with some age are both good tests. The rings are harder on edges than rosewood or ebony in some cases, and they can mislead people to think that decent consumer chisels won't hold an edge. I never cared for the fascination to start beginners with yellow pine - it's OK if it's a little wet, but once it dries, it's sheets of glass with insulation in between them. if one spent $400 on chisels and $75 on wood, they'd be much less successful than if they flipped those two numbers around and bought really good wood and much cheaper chisels. Such as any decent used chisel set on ebay and some $10 a board foot mahogany.)

That's spot on, the difference between a "Maker" and high volume industrial production...

You have to communicate how your things are different from what you can get in the store, and why somebody should care. And, you have to make products that back that notion up.

The real problem with A2 wasn't the boutique fellows making chisels out of it. Their product was usually very good. It was the cheap import factories tagging along on specification-itis. Oh, I can get this Chinesium product that's "exactly the same" (wink wink) for one-eighth the price. Except it's not the same. That cheaply made product amplifies the worst of all worlds because it's not made right. The cheap A2 and HSS plane irons were very hard to sharpen but their edges also didn't hold up.

So for example... quartersawn oak makes a fabulous back and sides material for acoustic guitars. The flame grain is beautiful, the stuff is sustainable, and it really sounds nice. The problem is that nobody will buy them. Same for cherry and walnut. It's too much like cabinetry or firewood. The wood is too "Common."

Rosewood, on the other hand, can be terrible stuff. Lots of people are allergic to it. It's often crack prone, is super hard, and the dust stains stuff. It's oily and can be hard to finish... And many of the more available flavors really don't make a better guitar, but people eat the stuff up because it's exotic, expensive, and hard to find. Give me osage orange or honey locust any day instead of rosewood for guitar back and sides, but no. Nobody wants instruments made of fence posts.

Anyway, as a maker, you have to set yourself apart... And that means very good steel made into an exceptional product. When the flood of imports shows up touting 26C3, Hitachi White Paper 1A, and magic dust, you gotta trot out your testing to show that your product is in fact better because of what you do with it.

It's no different than flour. The flour used in Wonderbread comes from wheat, just like the flour in french baguettes, yet nobody would declare them "the same," just because they're both made of flour...

But... Look at the marketing for modern hand driven edge tools. The ad copy says nothing. There's literally zero product differentiation apart the logo and color of the handles. So, then, if there's no difference, why not buy discount China store fare? Look on Amazon at the number of reviews for miscellaneous import stuff... A $29/4 set of chisels has 7,500 reviews where Narex Richter has twenty, Stubai has 5 or 6, and two cherries has a few dozen. Which one is better?

So yeah.. You gotta articulate why your product is different/better.

I have been pondering your posts for a while and I find your explorations interesting.

I was wondering if you forge, in which case using 3/8 thick stock available with shirogami 1 and/or 125Cr1 from NJSB is a viable solution if you want to have sturdy bolsters. Just need to squish em down and work the bar all around, should do well.

I think the NJSB 125Cr1 is the most pragmatic choice here, be it for the expected results and the price and the size choice.
It is very likely as good as 26c3 (which is excellent and my most used steel too) but cheaper and available in thicker stock which can be nice if you plan on forging it down a bit.

I asked NJSB for the actual spec sheets for their 125Cr1, still waiting for an answer. I have no doubt that it is as clean as 26c3, just maybe more disparate in its actual composition. It's made by Buderus, which is a part of Bohler-Uddeholm-Voestalpine steel corporation (same as 26c3), and referring with previous spec sheets from them on 1095 and w2 their steel is usually very clean, around 0.001P and S, which is very decently clean, I highly doubt there is a perceptible difference with 26c3 or hitachi in real world use.

I had an old Globe file analyzed at my local college and the spec sheet was coherent with 125Cr1, and the results were absolutely indiscernible with 26c3 with same HT protocol ( I use ht oven and very tight recipes for normalizing annealing and aust. before quench).
I made water quenched with clay slurry ni-mai chisels and san mai kitchen knives with the file steel laminated either with 1010 mild steel or old wrought iron and long story short it is superb. I have some experience with shirogami 1 in prelam bars and the results I get with either old file or 26c3 are on par so far.
I leave it around 64-65hrc and it keeps a relatively tough, terrific edge long enough, and is very easy to strop back, as does anything I do with 26c3 and other simpler low alloyed steels tbh.

I was also thinking about your results with 115CrV3, I dabbled with it a bit, how long do you soak it at temperature before quench? the chrome makes it mandatory to have at least 10min soak otherwise the carbon doesn't get into solution enough.
in my books with a soak the 115CrV3 is deeper hardening than w1, 26c3, 1095, shirogami and the likes. It's no coincidence Pferd uses it for gouges, very great steel when well treated, very tough and gets very hard.

Another alternative is GFS silver steel, it is a weird one, 1%C, 0.95%Cr and 0.2%V, is deeper hardening than the other steels mentionned there but still somewhat shallow hardening comapred to 01 or even 52100.
It is pretty cheap and is now available with Pop's supplies. very good steel for what you aim for as long as you soak it a bit.

Another one that is great is 135Cr3 from france, a little higher carbon and some more alloying compared to 26c3, looks a lot like 115CrV3 with just more carbon.

The truth is that any of these steels if you have the good stock size wise and have the Ht figured down will be able to make a terrific 64Hrc chisel while still being tough enough, damn even 1095 is getting some new love from me nowadays as it is no slouch when left hard for the kind of use you speak about. just pick one and delve deeper I'd say.

Good luck in your endeavor, it sure will make for some terrific chisels one day !!

thanks, Lotfong. You're right on the mark with what you're saying about alloys. I got started with 26c3 after making chisels out of files and eventually getting exasperated with the fact that I'd looted everything thick in older files on ebay. I do believe that one could find a low cost indian file with some thickness and then maybe buy a whole lot of those files and if willing to accommodate any quirks (may be low hardenability enough to need a brine quench instead of oil)....one would be able to get fineness and qualities similar to hitachi white 1.

On ebay, older heller files and some others had more thickness than new files and could be ground to about 0.25". Newer flat files are thinner and thus the deal is off as I just can't do anything with stock thinner than 0.25" - it starts to be very apparent that the bolster area is too thin and making it wider makes it look goofy.

So, anyway, I bought a knife book by larrin thomas and was running out of options to differentiate chisels from more common stuff like O1 and it suggested 26c3 but mentioned high hardness and low toughness. I figured it would fail. However, I get book hardness (68/69 out of the quench) and toughness is higher than O1 is capable of even at lower hardness. My conclusion was I think what you're hinting at -if you can get into the 1.25% carbon range where white steel and 125cr1 and others are, it should all be the same game. if Chromium is boosted to near 1%, things change, as it's not iron carbides with a little chromium but rather a much more chromium bound structure.

I cheat with heat treat, by the way. I don't really soak anything because I'm working in the open air. There is a trade here - you can get superb grain structure and maybe more toughness than a furnace sample by doing something more akin to induction heating industrially. You push the temp well past what the soak would be, but very short duration - like 10 seconds - and then quench. to coax carbon out of chromium, you have to do cycles of this like a blacksmith would normalize in the open air, then back the grain to small size with thermal cycles and then hit this high temperature quick heat again (it takes experimenting) to ensure some open time for transition to martensite - longer than a lower heat - and you can match the schedule results then.

For example, W1 and 52100 samples last week both hit 68 out of the quench and thus there is no issue with retained austenite with W1 and shouldn't be any with 52100 - if there is one with 52100, the quench hardness will be suspect and low - like maybe 63/64. Larrin's articles about 52100 suggest that people being tentative with it with a furnace and not having the right starting microstructure can really end up off the mark, like 57 hardness after a 400F temper.

That leads into what I did with 115crv3 - everything, all the way up to keeping it in a soak open atmosphere and ignoring decarb and still finding no satisfaction. There was something wrong with the bar that I have, but it's precision ground and intended for linear drive shafting, so whoever is buying it from Maedler probably never ventures into hardening it and won't care. But I do.

I'm going around in circles a little here rambling but am short of sleep - it looks like NJSB has no melt sheet yet for 125cr1, but I have a bunch of it in hand and just haven't used it. 3/8" bar is useful to me even if I can't get it in round. I'd imagine it will be similar to Voestalpine's cleanliness. Alpha knife steel doesn't present the melt sheets publicly - you have to buy the steel and then take the three letter code off of it like a kid using a decoder ring, but the samples that I have are approximately in line with the white spec.

I don't remember the 125cr1 press release, but it's probably buderus and if it is, it's probably coarse spheroidized (I hope not, but most of the other stuff from buderus is coarse spheroid and you have to do some work to get the carbon back in solution and get the microstructure set up to convert to martensite efficiently in the quench).

I would love to send samples of everything with my method to Larrin and he would probably test them - I can test hardness, but he likes to test toughness. When I bettered the 26c3 heat treat furnace specs by a wide margin, I was pretty happy about it and I got the sense that he felt like I was wasting his time because I'm trying to come up with a way to match or better furnace heat treat in open air. I get why he thinks that, but there is flexibility making things like chisels not heating the entire black identically and the desire to do that doesn't sink in with the knife community. It could be done in a salt pot, too, but salt pots aren't cheap and probably aren't a great thing to use in a garage - especially if the pot is filled with the salt mix that will go really high temp for more complex steels with vanadium or niobium carbides.

At any rate, I've been able to get high hardness pretty much out of everything not defective and in some cases, matching what a furnace would get with cryo and I have not yet tried cryo. I have a dewar, but have not set enough aside to justify going to get it filled.

68.5 today on a chisel of 52100, though I had to harden it twice. a little more than an inch from the edge of the chisel and the reading is still 68. No warp that won't be removed by finishing processes.

the first go around yielded 64 out of the quench, which would end up making a very tough 60 hardness knife, but terrible for chisels.

I've brine quenched a couple of things twice and the second one always comes a little easy.

the difficulty of 52100 with a furnace is two-fold, as you almost certainly already know:
1) it's got fairly little carbon in solution, and on top of that, it's often delivered in a condition that makes it easy to machine if it's not hardened. Hardened rod from mcmaster comes at 59/60, so pushing high hardness doesn't seem to have industrial precedent with it. Ball bearings may be harder, but I don't know if they are or not. There would be less penalty for slightly enlarged grain with them because they have no acute surface
2) retained austenite is a problem if the steel is held at a temp slightly too high leading to a worse result than underheating and getting the same hardness

I really don't have any idea why it's easier to get the most out of the quench ignoring the soak, but it does seem easier to manipulate things using my method. it does take attention and judgement as a trade for controlled times and machine accuracy.

Large industrial bearings, like the sort used in rolling mills, hammer mills, and granulators, typically have very hard wear faces and soft/normalized core/everywhere else. The use of shallow hardening steel is intentional to prevent catastrophic failure via the bearing splitting without warning from shock/flexing. They still fail, but they tend to chip out and then grind themselves to bits. That sort of behavior gives some warning that bad things are happening before a red hot, half-mile long ribbon of steel pukes out the side of a high speed rolling mill.

Linear bearing rod and ballscrew stock is similar. They want a super hard surface for wear resistance, but a much softer core to take some flex and misalignment without snapping in half.

This is different than drill rod, which usually shoots for a cutting end which is both very hard and capable of being resharpened, with a somewhat softer shank.

The interesting thing is that the wide variety of applications suggest multiple different preparations/metal structures which could nominally come from the "Same alloy."

BUT.... While the chase is good, it's better to develop a process that separates your product from the discount house and hardware store fare. This isn't happening in the world as it stands, until you get to the top. The reality is that the work it takes to get stuff to that level basically prices the cheap stuff out of the market. Realistically, would anybody buy an Asia import chisel that tests "Almost as good as Lie Nielsen" if it sold at 85% of Lie Nielsen's price? Now... If Two Cherries or Ashley Iles bellied up to the bar like Narex did with their Richter series, they could get that premium price level, but not Aldi or Lidl.

Ed Fowler was a master of this. His knives were pretty soft. The blades were only hard on the cutting edges. AND he used steel that was fairly common (52100.). BUT... He successfully differentiated his product with how he made it, the grain structure he achieved, and then tied that to their performance in real life. So, for example, just because his knives were made of 52100 and came out around Rc56 didn't mean anybody believed a Pakistan made 52100 knife at Rc 56 to be "just as good."