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yepimonfire

Joined
Nov 7, 2013
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Based on it's composition, it should be the chinese version of thyssen krupp 4116. The only knife I own in it is a gerber warrant. It takes a nice sharp edge, but loses it VERY VERY fast. I'm talking 4-5 strips of cardboard and it fails to easily cut printer paper. Even my AUS 8a knives can handle 60-70 cuts into a box before becoming noticeably dull, and my cheap mystery steel kitchen knives (probably a close variant of 420j2) will do about 30-40. Assuming it's hardened at the low end of it's range at 55HRC, this still makes no sense. I've also owned several knives in 4116 (cold steel roach belly and kudu) and they have much much better edge retention than this, about the same or slightly better than average kitchen knife steels.

Any clue what could be happening?
 
Some alloys are more prone to forming a wire edge than others. Especially if tempered to a lower hardness. Your cutting experience sounds like you have a wire edge issue to me.
 
knarfeng said:
Some alloys are more prone to forming a wire edge than others. Especially if tempered to a lower hardness. Your cutting experience sounds like you have a wire edge issue to me.
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You'd think so, but i've stropped the heck out of it and looked at it under a microscope, no wire edge.
 
I've had questionable success with stropping to remove a burr. In any case, it sounds like you definitely have a sharpening issue. How many times have you sharpened it, and on what? I have a knife in similar steel (unknown, but likely close), that has made it through 3000' of cardboard and will still slice paper no problem.
 
I went through and resharpened the entire edge, I had never sharpened it before, just honed/stropped as it went dull. I'm wondering if the initial factory belt sander sharpening didn't pull the temper out of the very edge, that's what it behaved like and now that the edge has been redone it cuts fine. I had the same issue with some kitchen knives, wouldn't hold an edge for crap, and would microchip during use, only touched up and stropped, I eventually went through and reground the whole bevel and the problem disappeared.
 
Yeah, that's been known to happen. I've heard some older cats say that you won't know how well a knife will perform until you sharpen it yourself.
 
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