Those steels were pretty bad compared to what we see from even the economy manufacturers in places like China. By cutlery he meant spoons, forks, cake slicers, etc. Not high performance knives.
Gaston, if you like large knives in stainless there are plenty of manufacturers who use 420, 420j2, even some of the 3 series steels. They are pretty inexpensive and don't have great reps but have you actually tried working to destruction these stainless knives and hatchets? They are pretty tough. Not for me but still pretty tough. Master cutlery and others get looked down on here but some that actually use them find them hard to destroy without trying. Quarter inch 420 steel is pretty tough. They would be in the low 50's Rc just like that Randall you like.
Randalls in 440B are 57-59. It's their 0-1 that is 54-56. Strange that they would claim their 0-1 holds an edge 10% better, which it doesn't...
I've owned at least one Chinese stainless Kershaw folder, an RJ Martin "Tactical 3.5" 1986MW (it came free with an Al Mar SERE...) and my hand-reprofiled edge on it micro-folded instantly upon slicing the 1/8" thick cardboard of an Evian water 12 pack box... I mean it obviously micro-folded
throughout the blade in
one slice... Same with S30V on a Gerber Mark II anniversary dagger: A
continuous Micro-fold from one slice, maybe two, in the same cardboard...
By contrast, a 1940-vintage
stainless Sabatier Jeune Boy Sout knife, 7" blade on 3/16 stock (yes, that was standard issue to 10 year old Boy Scouts in France, from the 1930s to the 1960s...), could do dozens of slices in the same box with no detectable micro-folding (not my knife pictured here):
This even after a heavy full re-grind down to a 0.010" edge at 12 degrees per side (old stainless knives are often ground quite dull and "rounded" at the edge, giving them an understandable bad reputation). This 75 years old knife widely outperformed all the powder steels knives I have tried,
even chopping dried maple 40 times with this overly thin edge, with no damage and almost no micro-folding (intermittent only, and barely detectable), while S30V or CPM 154 would micro-fold instantly over a broad edge section in ONE hit, on the same wood (even on a $2000 10.5" blade RJ Martin no less), despite being up to
four times thicker with a 0.040" edge base at over 15 degrees per side...
In fact the only trouble the French knife displayed while chopping was some slight loosening of the tightness on the stacked leather handle, which the thin 3/16" X 1/4" stick tang probably didn't help...: I "stabilized" this by running extra-thin crazy glue in between the leather washers throughout the handle, and into the tang, turning the handle into a solid and rigid mass of glued leather... It is very solid now, but given the brittleness of crazy glue to vibrations, it is still best to not use it as a chopper...
Those steels were pretty bad compared to what we see from even the economy manufacturers in places like China.
You obviously have not tried 1940s vintage French stainless steels... Old stainless knives are often badly ground with indistinct "rounded" edges that make them very hard to sharpen, I guess because the factories found stainless too hard-wearing on the belts to do a crisp job: They instead went "cheap" and kept using worn out belts that gave these rounded bevels, giving old stainless knives the bad reputation of being dull and unsharpenable...
The idea that early stainless steels are crap is just an assumption: Most of my worst experiences with 440C (and 440 can get pretty abysmal), were almost all on recently made custom knives. Unfortunately, the powder steels I have tried, 2 in S30V and one in CPM 154, were hardly any better... I'm guessing the micro-folded edges on those remain undetected and hang on for a long time, which is why people think well of them. Or they are just kept open angled enough to not fold... (I hope this is not the case of INFI after I re-profile my Battlesaw, because the factory edge angle on that is more akin to a Disney movie prop...)
Given the choice of newer stainless steels vs vintage, or even new 440 vs old 440, I would pick vintage stainless every time... I did get a bad old one recently, but it was low-end Oryx/Parker-Imai stuff.
Gaston
