jdm61
itinerant metal pounder
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2005
- Messages
- 47,357
In a recent conversation, Hoss said that he was digging 4340 as cladding for san mai as it gets up to around 52Rc at the temps used to harden high carbon core steel and it is less reactive than say mild steel. I know that some of the brethren use 4140 for hawks because it is tough as nails and 4340 is supposed to be a bit tougher in some aspects because of the 1.5-2% nickel . So I was wondering what you guys thought about the idea of a 4140/4340 forge welded blend for san mai cladding with say a shallow hardening core steel like CruForgeV or 52100?. 4140 seems to have enough manganese to get dark, but it also has up to 1% chromium, so I wonder about it going "gray." It seems to me that one of the primary complaints about 4340 for making hawks and such is that it is typically sold in round bar form. But if you are already set up to forge weld, that doesn't seem like a huge problem. You would still end up with a cladding blend made from readily available and fairly inexpensive tough steels.
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I was just thinking about using super duper tough cladding, even if only as a sales pitch. 
The thing that got me thinking about using relatively hardening cladding was Murray Carter's used of 1035-45 in his FS1 fighting knife which originally used Blue Super as the core steel. Like I said, the 4340 idea came from Hoss who said that it not only hardens up (and is super tough) but is also less reactive than 10xx steels. That is a factor with kitchen knives IMO. I think that Salem Straub used AEB-L as cladding on one project, but I am not sure how much that would harden, if at all, at 1475-1500F. IIRC, Damasteel uses something akin to 4140 and 4340 for their "damascus" rifle barrels.