52100 vs ball bearing steel

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Natlek

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Jun 9, 2015
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Ok , 52100 steel from knive shop against say NSK ball bearing steel . I made some knive from both steel and I have filing that NSK ball bearing steel is much better then regular 52100 steel . NSK , SKF claim that they use Extra clean 52100 chrome steel and that life of bearing is increased about 80% then regular 52100 ?? What I ask is what steel knive shop sell to us ? What is the truth ?
 
The reason that people initially used 52100 bearings and races is that was what they could get their hands on.
 
Most of the performane differences in 52100 come down to heat treat. Dial it in for your source. Unless there is a proprietary smelt. Look at the specs on the steel. There isn't much difference between different sources.
 
I also use nsk bearing steel. Provided we don't mess too much it by forging, improvements vs stock 52100 come from the fact we are starting from a martensite configuration instead of an heavily spheroidized state, which requires putting back the carbon in solution rather than simply austenitize & quench. But as has been said, a sound heat treatment procedure (normalization, thermal cycling, austenitization, quench) will cancel all the differences.
 
True, and 52100, like D2, is a steel where deviating a little bit from the "industry standard" HT regimen for bearings can be a desirable thing when making knives.
Willie71 said:
Most of the performane differences in 52100 come down to heat treat. Dial it in for your source. Unless there is a proprietary smelt. Look at the specs on the steel. There isn't much difference between different sources.
Click to expand...
 
Bearing steels --The chromium steels -there were a family ,50100, 51100, 52100 as the basic ones in the USA .The difference there was hardenability.There were silmilar steels in Europe and Japan. There was great competitiion between them .Some of our bearing companies had manufacturing in other countries.The basic drive for better bearings was in making cleaner steels .That meaning fewer non-metallic inclusions [ sulphides and oxides ] .There were different standards for different industries , bearing , aircraft, etc. Bearings were the best though it's questionable that the quality is needed for knives .We developed various methods for getting cleaner steels such as the ESR as Butch mentioned , vacuum degassing etc .Anything we could think of. We ?yes I worked for Timken. Competition ? We made regular checks of the competitions products .
But knife makers were stuck with somebody elses steels .About 1970 Crucible developed the CPM system which certainly did give us better knives .I wasn't dealing with knives then but my favorites today are CPM S35VN and CPM 3V. We now have a very large choice of fine blade steels , take your pick !! Steel and HT .
 
in my experience ball bearing steel is one of the best "bet" as a quality mistery steel :) As long as it is deep hardening it would be willing to be treated as 52100 and makes a nice blade.
 
Many bearing failures are caused by inclusions under the surface that's why we want it clean!
 
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