Thread: 10V after crabbiness at wright's supposed test data

CPM 10V Steel - History, Properties, and How to Heat Treat - Knife Steel Nerds

here's larrin's write up on 10V. I think he likes it. he hates XHP (V11), which I've never been able to fully grasp, but I think it's a knife thing and I personally like knives made from it more than woodworking tools for day to day work.

What doesn't V11/XHP do? It's not totally stainless, just marginally, and it's not tough. But it's tough enough. Lower toughness steels break, and stainless steels that stain or spot apparently get returned to makers in droves. We're not cutting food with plane irons and nobody is bending them, so as a smoother in clean wood, I think V11 is wonderful. it also doesn't have fragile vanadium carbides in it that are also a bear to sharpen, beyond the "twice as slow" bar that V11 sets vs. something like hard O1. Some volume of vanadium carbides at high hardness just makes honing and grinding slow, and when a nick occurs, it's a real pain.

You can really only sharpen the stuff properly with a diamond finish, and magnacut may evade that if others don't only because the carbides are tiny and the difference between breaking them and abrading the matrix vs. cutting through them with diamonds will be small. it's not small with 10V. Under a microscope, if you use regular sharpening media even in the soft delivered hardness that the DFM comes in, you're left with something that looks like sand.

What did I get for hardness with my DFM iron, by the way? two strikes around 58.5. I've never seen any iron hold up well at that.

Back to the data sheets above - 10V at higher hardness, you can see in the chart in the middle:

https://i0.wp.com/knifesteelnerds.co...1%2C1536&ssl=1

Go way up to the 700-800 range. It just has to have enough strength from hardness not to shed its early fine edge - or at least see if that's possible.

it suffers little loss in toughness, so something like a 64 spec range to start would've been better. I mentioned this to the guy at DFM but he was concerned about chipping. I fear his efforts were lost, and the steel wasn't cheap. I also suggested that 4V might be a better compromise as it can get hard enough, but will have better edge stability at the edge. he doesn't know me from anyone else, an I'm sure an influencer is more valuable to take opinions from if you're trying to get stuff sold.

It does also highlight something - you can introduce a very good iron and get little for sales without an influencer pushing. Lake Erie will probably sell a lot of magnacut irons. They're good irons, but there's nothing offered by them that's unprecedented in a sense of wood use, and if all of them have a soft first bevel, people glowing about their performance are just parrots. But we have a lot of those. You could introduce an iron that would've only shown up on Brent Beach's tests, like the 3V and ASW M2 irons did - and it would be little noticed. If nobody actually notices something is good without being told what to think by an influencer, this is pretty illuminating.

I expect 10V doesn't offer any benefit over more basic steels in a proper hardness range to a serious woodworker, but I figure my iron is at least worth a try before I cut it in half and make two marking knives out of it or something. I think vanadium isn't a "woodworker's carbide" unless it's in turning tools. it's a carbide for someone who wants to rub metal on metal, and at that (and especially wear tests that are much more harsh than planing or the sandy catra test machine cards), it excels. Like wear parts in manufacturing or metal dies that don't have acute angles, it would dominate.

Note, for that card test chart, you might expect at 59, the catra machine would still show 700 results (V11 would be 580, magnacut just below and CPM M4 would depend on hardness. The CPM M4 iron I tested was 64 hardness, heat treated by paul bos. It's sort of the upper limit of what M4 can do it and it slightly outran v11, but at the expensive of significantly greater planing resistance. it, too, doesn't really have a practical point in planes and the fatigue wouldn't be noticed in a couple of test shaves. It made my wrists hurt, and then since it and V11 were the only long-lasters, my wrists would get less sore while planing with V11 and then sore again with m4. Same plane, same wood, and so on - weighing shavings and everything.

here is a chart of what I think is suspect data on Wright's test - there are plenty of instances, this is just one. The test itself is relatively unintelligible in terms of describing how it actually pertains to planing. We personally notice a list of things when planing:
* how easily a plane starts
* whether or not we need to apply down pressure. with the cap set keeping a plane in wood, this should not be necessary, but when clearance is lost and you go longer than you should, people do it - bad habit
* how much resistance is needed laterally
* the surface of the wood
* the shaving for the same set. Interestingly, an iron not working as smoothly through wood will feel same effort and the shavings will weigh less at the same setting. less shaving weight, less work being done.

one of the counterintuitive thing about using the cap iron is that it does initially create some additional resistance, but it gets you to continuous wood a lot more quickly, which ultimately is much less work, and suddenly the economy of it when doing more than just smoothing begins to make sense. Economic advantage means elimination of something else (historically, the single iron in bench planes).

At any rate, the dullness chart for V11:

v11.PNG

lake erie "thick"
lake erie toolworks.PNG

zen woo wood plane
zen woo.PNG

What's strange is first, I never saw any evidence of this (v11 felt sharper in sort of a gamed environment just planing an edge over and over, and left a surface at least as bright as anything else. I'm convinced some of the feel of ease is due to slickness of wood over the iron of one steel vs. another. I've not been able to find data on this because machines do the work now and nobody cares about that. Yet another reason I was a bit chapped-rear to find it can't duplicate these characteristics in anything but the most ideal situations. The try plane sets things up for the smoother in such a way when you work by hand that smoothing is (borrowing from shawshank redemption), started and then quickly gone like a fart in the breeze.

One of the arbitrary measures in wrights "test" is when the chart above gets to 300. Notice that V11 somehow gets there all at once and then lands at the end in approximately the same place.

I took pictures of edges every 200 feet while I was testing so that if there was something funny going on, there would be pictures to show what it is.

That was my experience with high speed steel tipped irons. I was brazing quality, American made CPM toolbits onto the ends of plane irons and got some really long edge life, but it was exactly what you (and so many others) described...

The "Sharp" edge is pretty short lived, but then they hang in there with an edge that's half dull forever. So they do will do nice work in easy wood like Mahogany, Cherry, and Walnut forever... They'll shrug off hard stuff like rosewood with extra effort.... But they won't plane Spruce or Cedar worth a lick.

As to why they don't run high carbide volume stuff up to 64+ for woodworking tools? You can't sharpen them. That stuff is diamond only, and even then, it's painfully slow. That was part of the magic of PM-V11. The teeny carbide grains allowed them to slough off on "conventional" sharpening gear and still leave a pretty good edge. M4 will groove an Arkansas stone.

The thing is.... Yes, they have their place, and that place is powered woodworking tools. Quality power saw blades, router bits, and planer knives are all high carbide volume stuff where you've got the power to make use of the optimal (fat) edge geometry on that stuff.

That makes total sense. It is worth noting that the classic, older carbon steel power saw blades require significantly less power due to the edge geometry. That was a big deal in the early days, and Skil saws from 70 years ago bog down and overheat if you use a modern carbide blade.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

That was my experience with high speed steel tipped irons. I was brazing quality, American made CPM toolbits onto the ends of plane irons and got some really long edge life, but it was exactly what you (and so many others) described...

The "Sharp" edge is pretty short lived, but then they hang in there with an edge that's half dull forever. So they do will do nice work in easy wood like Mahogany, Cherry, and Walnut forever... They'll shrug off hard stuff like rosewood with extra effort.... But they won't plane Spruce or Cedar worth a lick.

As to why they don't run high carbide volume stuff up to 64+ for woodworking tools? You can't sharpen them. That stuff is diamond only, and even then, it's painfully slow. That was part of the magic of PM-V11. The teeny carbide grains allowed them to slough off on "conventional" sharpening gear and still leave a pretty good edge. M4 will groove an Arkansas stone.

The thing is.... Yes, they have their place, and that place is powered woodworking tools. Quality power saw blades, router bits, and planer knives are all high carbide volume stuff where you've got the power to make use of the optimal (fat) edge geometry on that stuff.

That makes total sense. It is worth noting that the classic, older carbon steel power saw blades require significantly less power due to the edge geometry. That was a big deal in the early days, and Skil saws from 70 years ago bog down and overheat if you use a modern carbide blade.

LV describes V11 as being really "tough" due to cryo treatment, which is a false statement, but not one they would've made with malice. Cryo treatment improves strength at the cost of some toughness.

They also refer to the grain of the steel being exceedingly fine, but the grain probably isn't that fine, and the carbides definitely aren't. That's one thing that larrin can claim about magnacut - the carbides are very fine. CTS XHP and other high carbide volume steels don't necessarily have fine carbides, but the distribution of them is more even.

I mentioned to larrin that I liked XHP as a woodworking steel better than vanadium steels and he was nonplussed. he's looking through a different lens. I also sent him samples of 26c3 that were forge heat treated at an average of 63.8 hardness after tempered and had twice the toughness of the oven treated samples he's posted. he was also not interested in that, and when I sent a subpar sample later of 1084 (later corrected that), he was pretty happy!

I think what larrin doesn't gather that we do is chromium carbides evenly distributed may not be as good as very very fine carbides, but they are less fragile and better suited when sharpening will be constant if any edge defect appears.

the battle that I've thought would be interesting is what if you could get edge stability with really fine carbides and some wear resistance, but I haven't seen anything in terms of steel that really hits that. AEB-L is excellent, but the thing that makes it so fine carbide-wise is also what kills edge stability a little bit. It has to be fine for its purpose (blanking steel for razor blades) but nobody seems to care if it lacks edge strength and they are coated with a hard coating, anyway. I've been able to heat treat it to 61 and it works well in a knife, but I don't perceive any advantage other than longer edge life in wood - but the edge doesn't have the quality we all seem to like from a 1% carbon steel.

you are exactly right about 10V. it will be a pain if it comes out of temper at 64 or 65. it will be pretty close to intolerable on anything other than silicon carbide or diamonds, and in day to day work for me, it's stability and uniformity that lead to less work, and not long intervals between sharpening.

There was a small group of folks in the knife world who liked XHP, too, but they lost out. It sort of fell out of favor in favor of a vanadium stainless when the patent ran out and that's right around when LV picked it up and started putting it in tools. Someone on SMC pointed that out back then, but it went over my head. He was one of the two people I'm aware of who had it XRFed.

As woodworkers, we probably don't live in a world where sharpening a knife is a half our science experiment with some gadget that looks like a robot. From a knife making standpoint, know I have no interest in working with a steel that also is terrible to hand finish as at some point, you want to hand finish a knife in a way that can be duplicated. I do it linearly with 220 grit sandpaper on a cushioned backing followed by gray scotchbrite. if it ever gets marked up with handling or washing, it's easy to pretty it up. it would be a huge problem to hand finish vanadium steels with anything other than a special progressive set of loose diamond, and loose diamonds in various grits are very hard to prevent contaminating an area.

I've noticed the same thing with older electric tools -they depended more on the blades, etc, doing geometry that would work. The same dynamic actually exists in slicing knives. If you create a fixed test parameter and test S90V at an angle where it survives well and then test carbon steels at that angle, they look bad. if you take a carbon steel or an AEB-L and draw back the angle to where it will tolerate it (and a coarse vanadium carbide stainless won't), then the AEB-L knife will actually last longer in slicing or day to day work than the S90V iron will, even though the chart says no.

Larrin often talks about this, too, but people don't really get it when it seems more exciting to add the same spyderco in the next steel to the collection, and then scrape some pipes to see which lasts longer scraping steel pipe.

64 hardness after the first temper at 450f, well before heading to the freezer for an hour between tempers. Will probably lose another point in the second temper, but we'll see. Promising opportunity as far as getting a gauge on edge behavior at a much higher hardness.

well, I accidentally dropped the iron about 5 feet onto concrete while handling it. And a big chunk sprung off, so that ends the test early!!

I suspect the harsh quench was a bit too much and seeded a crack as I can see some color ingress at the edges where it broke.

Bummer! the grains/carbides remain very fine and uniform at the break.

I guess the plane to make two knives out of it is still its end. grinding it off at the break and redoing the whole thing is possible, but it's not a priority now.

Post tempering hardness after double temper is 62.5. would've been interesting see the difference in characteristics.

I had a little bit of time a few days ago and ended up grinding this off later in the day after thinking I'd make two knives out of the iron. it's still a better idea to do that.

rehardening one more go around and tempering brings the final result to 63 hardness on one side and 64 on the other. Not such accurate work on my part!

But last night after coming home from being on the road for the weekend, I ground a bevel on it, honed it and it still has an odd feel, and the feel doesn't translate to good planing. it's really kind of a surprise. Work is about to get really busy for a couple of months, but at some point, I will get one more look at the edge as it wears.

And if it doesn't seem any better, I'll cut it down the center with a grinder and make two marking knives out of it.

it's slow honing at 64, of course, but not impossible to deal with. It grinds fine on a high speed ceramic belt grinder, but a small bevel of anything will grind fine on a 5200 foot a minute grinder with a friable belt.

I think it may be that a woodturner could tell us its virtues. I'd rather have high hardness M2 if choosing a high speed steel for a plane iron. m2 doesn't have even as much edge life as V11, but it feels more like "normal steel" in a plane iron, and it lasts plenty long enough.

From my view as a pig trying everything I can find, 10V has smaller carbides than V11, lower volume of them by a sizable amount, much longer catra cut length and similar toughness in toughness testing. So it's a surprise that it can't be translated into a decent planing iron. Maybe magnacut and 3V get away with not spoiling the feel (with vanadium) only because the carbides are tiny.

I take everything on modern "High performance knife steels" with a giant grain of salt. Remember that the vast majority of the folks who own those super steel knives never even sharpen them. They run the factory edges till they're dull, and then either chuck it in a drawer or send it back to the mothership for resharpening.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the vast majority of reviews use only the factory edge.

Of course, if you do this sort of thing, then "edge life" is king and who cares about sharpenability.

The other knife user camp is folks who resharpen their own knives. That group generally rejects super steels in favor of things that resharpen readily. That world contains mostly 1060-1095 carbon steels and stainless steels that run from 18/8-420hc or maybe 440a, but stop there. Edge life is what you would expect out of a Buck/Case/Victorinox... But that doesn't matter because the owner keeps it sharp.

Cliff Stamp aggressively tested knifes, and he resharpened them. It was interesting how frequent heat treatment failures were. The other thing that surprised me, though maybe it shouldn't have, was that actual use levels the playing field really fast. Let your wife and kids use the kitchen knives. They dump them in the sink and run them through the dishwasher. In that world, name brand import models off the rack of a grocery store hold up as well as anything else, but take the edge because the knives don't rust or chip, and dings are quick to sharpen out. Fancy pants custom steels were a train wreck in this world.

That takes us full circle with chisel talk.

I visited Dad and Mom last week, and the set of Aldi chisels I prepped FIVE years ago needed sharpening. They had never been sharpened since I gave them to Dad. I gave them a whirl on whatever I could find inside the house - which turned out to be sandpaper followed by a soft arkansas stone. Worked fine and they're ready for another 5-years of light use. I probably would have dumped them back into their rusty coffee can if they had been HSS of some sort, A2, PMV11, or even Narex Richters, as they wouldn't have free hand sharpened via anything in the house.

Last thing...

I am pretty appalled that in my own tests, quite a few respected brands did quite poorly. Unfortunately, so did far too many vintage choices. The key determining indicator of poor performance in my hands appears to be modern drop forging. Stock removal (machined out of bar stock) models out perform drop forged models in nearly all cases.

So... What does that say? Maybe something, maybe nothing. It could just be my ham-fisted edge prep and testing. The key starting point, in all cases, is an edge prepped to wear rather than chipping or rolling. It was harder to achieve than I would have liked, but that was the key to getting results I could repeat.

There's definitely something unusual going on there, but I don't know when drop forging became the method of choice for chisels. If you see a round bolster and fat sides, it's almost always going to be a drop forged chisel, and until the last several decades, probably all of the basic chisels were drop forged not because drop forging makes a better chisel, but because you can get round bar and shape a chisel very quickly and inexpensively. The fact that the sides have gotten fatter is just a matter of thrift or maybe competitive pressure. But the last I've seen of higher carbon steel in chisels like that was probably 1960 or before.

One of the few groups still drawing chisels out is Ashley iles. I've had one set of chisels from a while ago that was a little soft (but not used long enough to know if they were through and through) and then a set of bench chisels (mk2) that were excellent. More of a chisel than LV's V11 offering that I bought for the original unicorn article, but who knows - maybe another sample at another time would reverse fortunes. I believe the Iles chisel was harder than its 61 spec, but can't confirm now that I can dent test because the chisels are gone.

There's a knife test data sheet floating around where knives are XRFed and hardness tested. Most are the steel they say they are, but a very large % are under the hardness spec with a big correlation by maker. When a knife is sold from kind of the lowest cost chinese makers that are popular in videos, it's common for something that's supposedly D2 to be one of the inexpensive mid carbon knives that end up around 57 hardness but are really hard to break.

I think bad heat treat is more common in knives because there's no real penalty for it, and most users don't know the difference. What does change if you underharden a knife (based on what larrin told me triggers the worst types of returns - broken knives and stainless knives that stain a little bit) is you get fewer people able to break a knife without showing evidence that it was bent really far, and that means fewer returns.

Knife Test XRF & HRC Results ! Surprising and interesting information ! - YouTube

that's the guy

One last comment on drop forging. Steel moves easily when it's at the high end of the forging temperature range. Video doesn't interpret light well with hot steel - it depends on what the camera wants to do, but it looks like the wire that's fed to someone drop forging is very hot. The drop forging if it moves a lot of metal and compresses it should lead to smaller grain, but there is no guarantee that such an improvement will occur, and if the bar stock is chosen from a cheap source, it could start off with a poorer structure.

if you buy high quality rolled bar, quality issues are rare. I have had exactly one piece of bar stock (1095) that actually showed defects. the rest varied according to their spec in terms of carbide size - some are delivered with big spheriod carbides because that's easiest to machine, but you can correct the microstructure and carbide size without touching the steel - just with normalizing and then thermal treatment.

i don't think drop forged chisels get that kind of thing - they're usually forged in a pair of dies a at a high temperature, thrown in a box and are reasonably fine because they weren't quenched from a high temperature, but they then run through an automated system that splashes them. (Iles looks like they do things razor style, dipping in a rack - much closer to what hand heat treatment would look like). the drop forged process doesn't appear to address any thermal treatment to shrink grain, so the solution is to avoid anything that is trouble toughness-wise, and that's done by choosing a lower carbon. What you get is much like the aldi chisels, which test around 59 hardness.

Bar stock, on the other hand, is rolled in a process at a good mill, the carbides are forged into elongated grain-direction shape, which is probably fine if never addressed, but the forging through rolling is thorough and they then see a furnace schedule when sent to commercial heat treat and just get a much better process outside of the forging.

it should be the case that the drop forged stuff is better if the only difference is forging, but the forging is done and the real problem is the rest of the process is quicked.

The older chisels that I have, like ward and pre 1900 marples parers and so on are all better than anything I've gotten new, and a forged but later set of ward bench chisels is also better than anything I've bought that didn't come from japan.

And as mentioned, my chisels at this point are lightly shaped bar stock (hammered into a taper). There's an obligation to go back after forging and undo whatever damage the heat during forging does, and to relax the steel and clean up the grain boundaries with normalization. I think it isn't done and probably hasn't been for a very long time, so we don't have a good comparison other than a good quality japanese chisel in the 63/64 hardness range.

I've not seen a reason performance wise with my chisels to get further into forging - there is no performance gap and I can match the older wards and far better something like a new V11 chisel, and better the O1 iles chisels if for no other reason, I'm using a better alloy for chisels (1.5 - 2x the toughness at two points harder).

Actually, John - I remember a good comparison of grain size forged vs. not forged. Brent Beach's pictures.

Clifton Iron

Hock O1 iron

Knight iron

Clifton's irons are forged. The second irons are not forged, they are either laser/water cut or they are blanked. I'm not sure if you can blank O1, but a lot of the lower cost irons that you see on amazon for $8 or whatever are blanking steels. Even AEB-L is a blanking steel and it can be dreamy if it's heat treated above 60, and it's finer than most carbon steels, so blanking doesn't automatically make something bad, it just means you can literally rough irons out at 1 a second in a good blanking operation, which sure cuts expense in making, and the blanked slots are usually never touched up, so that's really cheap to do.

The hock iron looks better than clifton, and the cryo treated knight iron looks better yet. I had one of these knight cryo irons and another guy later tried to make inexpensive but crude planes, and included O1 cryo treated plane irons. They were very similar to knights - harder than you'd expect (a byproduct of cryo converting more to martensite, and also allowing diffusion to "compact" things).

Neither of the latter two irons are being cared for in a grain refinement or carbide dissolution through forging, but when a rolled product is thin like a 3/32nd bar stock or something, it's seen a *lot* of rolling in a careful process, and that's still forging. it's just forging that elongates grains to some extent.

With the clifton forged iron, an opportunity was lost. Something either resulted in larger carbides than the bottom two, or there was a grain refinement step missed.

The differentiating thing for me when I could finally beat ward chisels with my own wasn't an exotic forging process or anything else tedious or full of woo - it was repeated heats at the transition temperature and air cools or leaf blower cools, continuing to re-establish grains at the smallest possible size, and possibly slightly spheroidizing carbides.

in the old days, a normalizing heat would've been done after forging, and after air cooling from that heat (with a steel that doesn't harden in air), probably a few low temperature thermal cycles or "pre-quenches" and then a final quench. but i don't really know. Bill Tindall mentioned to me there are generally two iron ore types used - hematite and I can't recall the other. Steel is mostly made with the cheaper of the two now, but 200 years ago and then until ______, the opposite may have been in use.

Back to the 10V, though - with about 100 feet of planing, i see exposed carbides on my iron. I think there is something weird going on with the high vanadium carbide steels - they shed the matrix readily, and maybe they just look more pronounced because of the carbide volume, but they just feel weird. The india stone communicates that it's not interested in honing the stuff much, of course, not even in crushing the carbides to get at the rest of the matrix.

I'm sure I could get the iron to game a test of some sort where pure all out duration was the point, but there's just nothing about the stuff that does it for me. magnacut was similar on a less in your face way.

I think the chance 10V would make a good woodworking (cold,not turning) chisel (even if optimally heat treated) is pretty small.

Almost forgot - here's the google spreadsheet from that knife guy's testing.

Knife PMI and Rockwell Results - Google Sheets

It probably makes more sense to sort by manufacturer. There's definitely stuff in the knife community that wouldn't fly in woodworking - like hardness ranges advertised as 58-64. that sort of covers the range from inexpensive hardware store chisels that will roll in cherry to white steel 1 chisels that hold up well in tropical hardwoods. Red cells in the XRF test column confirm that a steel was advertised as one thing and shipped as another. It looks like it's a frequent thing if just scrolling, but not with reputable manufacturers. When you look up most of the names attached to those things, you find something like a S35VN folder being sold for $28 or something, and that should trigger an immediate ??? in the first place.

I wonder how people make out with those maxamet knives at 69 hardness.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

I take everything on modern "High performance knife steels" with a giant grain of salt. Remember that the vast majority of the folks who own those super steel knives never even sharpen them. They run the factory edges till they're dull, and then either chuck it in a drawer or send it back to the mothership for resharpening.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the vast majority of reviews use only the factory edge.

Of course, if you do this sort of thing, then "edge life" is king and who cares about sharpenability.

The other knife user camp is folks who resharpen their own knives. That group generally rejects super steels in favor of things that resharpen readily. That world contains mostly 1060-1095 carbon steels and stainless steels that run from 18/8-420hc or maybe 440a, but stop there. Edge life is what you would expect out of a Buck/Case/Victorinox... But that doesn't matter because the owner keeps it sharp.

Cliff Stamp aggressively tested knifes, and he resharpened them. It was interesting how frequent heat treatment failures were. The other thing that surprised me, though maybe it shouldn't have, was that actual use levels the playing field really fast. Let your wife and kids use the kitchen knives. They dump them in the sink and run them through the dishwasher. In that world, name brand import models off the rack of a grocery store hold up as well as anything else, but take the edge because the knives don't rust or chip, and dings are quick to sharpen out. Fancy pants custom steels were a train wreck in this world.

That takes us full circle with chisel talk.

I visited Dad and Mom last week, and the set of Aldi chisels I prepped FIVE years ago needed sharpening. They had never been sharpened since I gave them to Dad. I gave them a whirl on whatever I could find inside the house - which turned out to be sandpaper followed by a soft arkansas stone. Worked fine and they're ready for another 5-years of light use. I probably would have dumped them back into their rusty coffee can if they had been HSS of some sort, A2, PMV11, or even Narex Richters, as they wouldn't have free hand sharpened via anything in the house.

Last thing...

I am pretty appalled that in my own tests, quite a few respected brands did quite poorly. Unfortunately, so did far too many vintage choices. The key determining indicator of poor performance in my hands appears to be modern drop forging. Stock removal (machined out of bar stock) models out perform drop forged models in nearly all cases.

So... What does that say? Maybe something, maybe nothing. It could just be my ham-fisted edge prep and testing. The key starting point, in all cases, is an edge prepped to wear rather than chipping or rolling. It was harder to achieve than I would have liked, but that was the key to getting results I could repeat.

I'll get to test my thoughts on drawing out carbon steel soon as I drew out W1 rod today at lunch and with any luck will grind the blank that i drew out into a chisel this weekend. Maybe not, but maybe.

the only round rod I can find here that's worth using (as in local without going to an actual steel supplier's desk) is W1. I would like to have something with more carbon given the number of heats and inevitable surface decarb, but with some luck, it will just bring a 1% carbon steel down to 0.85 or 0.9% (little change in potential hardness, but martensite that's interwoven like a lath/fingers rather than overlaying plates- the latter is what gives 1095 and O1 a lack of toughness at high hardness, and really a lack of toughness at any chisel hardness.

the reason to draw out is to get an integral bolster rather than one forge welded - I probably said that already.

it's not trivial to draw out rod by hand, though. this is a little different than die forging because nothing is constrained and turning inside a die, etc. there is much more movement of metal doing this than there is when I would typically taper a piece of thicker flat stock. In that case, the hammering just compresses things a little but doesn't move them that much.

Thank goodness for an induction forge, though the exercise was not without disaster. I was forging the chisel to shape and it bounced off of the anvil and flew into a bucket of water. Luckily it's W1, but there's a nonzero chance that it's hiding cracks due to the shock. That's the bad news. the good news is there is enough steel in a single 5/8th rod to probably make a 7 chisel set, and the cost of the rod is $23.

tempered hardness will give me some idea of how much carbon is lost in the drawing out. the billet that I started with was 6" and if I finished drawing the tang out, it would be 10. Laterally, the bit of the chisel will grind back to about 1 inch.

I'm well schooled (well, self taught schooled plus some input from larrin and verhoeven) in forge normalizing the steel after this, though, and I don't expect to see larger grain or odd failures. I will bring the grain back to the smallest possible size after normalizing.

Originally Posted by D.W.

I think vanadium isn't a "woodworker's carbide" unless it's in turning tools.

Agreed, David.

Of the woodturning steels that are readily available, I have found from my 'in workshop' testing of different woodturning bowl gouges metals that 10V/A11 is the best performing on edge durability. There are a number of other better performers on edge durability, including 15V, Tantung and Tungsten Carbide, but these are unobtainable in a bowl gouge unless you make them yourself, which I have done for testing purposes. Here is a graph of my results with the first of those. Test done on very hard redgum with 55° bevel angle and #360 grind... NO! can't add that to this post just now. I might try to do that another time.

Interesting about the performance increases of your own shop made edge tools after several grain reduction/normalization cycles prior to hardening. Some of the inconsistency I have seen within store bought units hints at something like this...

My current hardware store favorite is relatively inexpensive, so I have the luxury of fooling with more than one. While, on average, they perform very well given the right prep, there is very large within-brand variation. Out of say 5 of the same unit tested for performance, 3 ran "Average" for them, one lower, and one considerably higher. The one that ran considerably higher got me curious.

So you could be right... Maybe 3rd shift rushed them through heat treatment and skipped a few steps in the name of throughput.

As an aside, I was doing some repairs on the deck and started off with my hardware store favorites, which ran great. Then I switched to a challenger from a competing brand, and promptly wrinkled the bevel. That one is going back.

I don't know how much variance there is with drop forged versions. there is a buck brothers version of chisels, and I've seen others similar, where wire comes out of an induction heat of 6 seconds. the wire length is cut by machine and the induction heat is the same each time. when the chisels get heat treated, they are spun in a fixture through splashing water, which in my experience is pretty consistent (if a little underwhelming, especially if you check hardness after the first inch).

But what's true with those steels is they are lower in carbon (like the 0.6 and 0.65% steels also used for spring steel) and higher in manganese. They're well designed for a heat treatment cycle that doesn't really involve anything other than a fast heat. there's no carbides of not to dissolve because the carbon is cut short so they aren't created (those chisels may deflect or bend over, but the steel is really smooth without much of a bite on the stones). Because of their composition, i don't think much is gained if they go through a longer computer controlled cycle. probably not. But if they don't get the same splash as they're zooming through a line, they come up a little short.

At one point, i got three different sets of marples blue chips. Each set had one chisel that wasn't hardened properly (and not close). but it wasn't the same chisel in each set. I've had a couple of others similar over the years with no defect, but they were all made and ground in a fixture.

And then a set of later marples boxwood handled chisels and all but two are unhardened. what happened? something in volume. Like water not functioning or something. the prior owner had them, tried just a couple of them and then passed them on. i've rehardened a few, but it's a pain - they will still warp. I'd have been better off selling them half priced to "someone who will reharden them".

There's a parallel with consumer knives - if you read furnace schedules for stainless steels, they may be a half hour soak or they may be more than that or have very complicated schedules as they get into complicated things like XHP or S35VN. But then you find out what consumer low dollar knives are and the steels are similar to the inexpensive chisel steels - they are cut short on carbon to try to prevent needing normalizing of any volume at a higher temperature, and the schedule is literally "heat to 1800F, hold for five minutes, cool in still air"

the knives are also ground and finished in a fixtured setup where the human intervention is transporting the knives from station to station. it works, you can use the knives and they're inexpensive. Some of them can be up into mid/high 50s hardness, be hard to break because there's not much carbide volume, and they can be sharpened and then kept in shape with a steel.

if someone wants to get something like 0.6% chrome manganese steel and work with chisels that are 59 hardness, there's little that can't be done if setting up an edge is understood. and refreshing and grinding them is pretty much an afterthought - you're done almost as soon as you start.