I Tested the Edge Retention of 48 Steels

Just wanted to say thanks to Larrin Larrin and @DeadboxHero for this incredible piece of work! This is solid gold! I'm also sorry for not becoming a Patreon supporter earlier... I've enjoyed several of the Knife Steel Nerds articles.

Cruwear, S90V, and AEB-L really stood out to me in this article.

Now that we have a solid benchmark for the wear resistance of all these steels at similar hardness, someone just needs to figure out a way to add microchipping/apex fracturing into the equation for some great real world steel rankings. Not it.
 
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"I'm not sure anyone wants rectangle knives without handles, but I will probably keep them so that I can do side-by-side comparisons in the future."

Larrin, Perhaps you can test the old theory that aging makes knife steel harder/tougher or whatever it's supposed to do. Maybe test a couple of each ( low alloy, high alloy, stainless) at one year, two year, 5 years etc. It's an old idea but not much talked about here at BF. I recall hearing it back in the late 60's so it's been around a while. You might be in a unique position to do definitive work on this.

I'm not referring to artificial aging done to some alloys but instead the natural process that supposedly increases hardness and wear resistance over the years by a small amount.

If you are going to keep them around anyways.:)

Joe
 
The Mastiff said:
"I'm not sure anyone wants rectangle knives without handles, but I will probably keep them so that I can do side-by-side comparisons in the future."

Larrin, Perhaps you can test the old theory that aging makes knife steel harder/tougher or whatever it's supposed to do. Maybe test a couple of each ( low alloy, high alloy, stainless) at one year, two year, 5 years etc. It's an old idea but not much talked about here at BF. I recall hearing it back in the late 60's so it's been around a while. You might be in a unique position to do definitive work on this.

I'm not referring to artificial aging done to some alloys but instead the natural process that supposedly increases hardness and wear resistance over the years by a small amount.

If you are going to keep them around anyways.:)

Joe
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Steel slowly tempers/ages over time but that makes it softer not harder. But the rate at which this occurs at room temperature is extremely slow. With the steels already having been tempered at 300F or higher it would take much (much) longer than 5 years for any perceptible differences to be found.
 
Nice work Larrin! Lots to digest here. Thank you and all who helped for your efforts, time and expense and for your generosity in sharing this with us!
 
Blues said:
And yet, if you read both our own, and Spyderco's independently owned forum, you'll come across many more issues reported from users with S110V vs. S90V blades. I'd be interested in hearing the opinions of Larrin and Shawn regarding this anecdotal evidence.
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I'm not Larrin or Shawn, but I wonder if it has to do with the amount of knives in circulation. In this instance, if there are more Spyderco knives in the hands of users in S110V vs S90V, it would stand to reason that there would be more issues reported. I know the Blurple models were popular.
 
CarsonWayne said:
I'm not Larrin or Shawn, but I wonder if it has to do with the amount of knives in circulation. In this instance, if there are more Spyderco knives in the hands of users in S110V vs S90V, it would stand to reason that there would be more issues reported. I know the Blurple models were popular.
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Possible, but most of the comments I read were from folks comparing the experience with S110V to their S90V blades.

That doesn't change the fact that differing heat treats and edge geometry may play a role, but if they are on the same pattern knife, (say a PM2 by way of example), it makes the comparison appear more legitimate.
 
Blues said:
Possible, but most of the comments I read were from folks comparing the experience with S110V to their S90V blades.

That doesn't change the fact that differing heat treats and edge geometry may play a role, but if they are on the same pattern knife, (say a PM2 by way of example), it makes the comparison appear more legitimate.
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Makes sense. I have a Native 5 in both S110V and S90V, but to be honest I haven't been able to tell the difference between the two. They both cut through anything and since I touch up on a stop with diamond spray emulsion I really have a hard time discerning between them. Perhaps more use will further separate their performances. Thanks!
 
Larrin Larrin & @DeadboxHero, would it be possible to get the TCC for each steel in numerical form as well as the ft-lbs toughness? I'd like to play around with some charts and see if anything stands out with the edge retention to toughness ratio, but it's a bit hard to extrapolate accurate numbers with the data on the Knife Steel Nerds. I was thinking that it would be best to have the TCC numbers normalized to a particular RC, but after thinking about it, I don't think that would be beneficial unless there was a way to also normalize the toughness to the same RC (which I don't see an easy way to do).

Thanks!
 
Fixall said:
Larrin Larrin & @DeadboxHero, would it be possible to get the TCC for each steel in numerical form as well as the ft-lbs toughness? I'd like to play around with some charts and see if anything stands out with the edge retention to toughness ratio, but it's a bit hard to extrapolate accurate numbers with the data on the Knife Steel Nerds. I was thinking that it would be best to have the TCC numbers normalized to a particular RC, but after thinking about it, I don't think that would be beneficial unless there was a way to also normalize the toughness to the same RC (which I don't see an easy way to do).

Thanks!
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I don't know if this will be helpful at all, but a member on Spyderco's own forum prepared this table:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wJ4zp3V_r2qWW2BWSItfJrPRZS7v_8iImv8TrU1KOl0/edit#gid=0
 
I was just going to put the toughness on the X axis and TCC on the Y axis and then plot all the steels that are in the 60rc - 63rc range to see if anything really stood out. I know the accuracy will be off since the steels will be at different levels of hardness, but the loss of toughness that comes with an increase in RC should offset that a bit.

I know you already have some of those up, but I just want to see how it looks once all the steels are on there and labeled.
 
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Blues said:
I don't know if this will be helpful at all, but a member on Spyderco's own forum prepared this table:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wJ4zp3V_r2qWW2BWSItfJrPRZS7v_8iImv8TrU1KOl0/edit#gid=0
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I somehow completely missed that the TCC was on the chart numerically and was just going by the graph. /facepalm. that spreadsheet really helps put everything in order though, thanks. :)

Larrin said:
I was working on a sortable table of toughness values at one point and got side-tracked. I will have to get it made.
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Perfect, thanks!

*edit
Found the answer to the second part of my post.
 
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Hardness effects on toughness are sometimes linear and sometimes not, unfortunately. It could be that a linear relationship could work well enough for simple comparisons but there is a bigger problem: different steels respond to hardness changes differently. If we go by Crucible datasheets, for example, dropping hardness of 15V from 64 to 58 Rc gets you 5 more ft-lbs (in a c-notch test, not the same as mine) while dropping hardness of 3V from 62 to 58 Rc gets you 45 more ft-lbs.
 
Larrin said:
Hardness effects on toughness are sometimes linear and sometimes not, unfortunately. It could be that a linear relationship could work well enough for simple comparisons but there is a bigger problem: different steels respond to hardness changes differently. If we go by Crucible datasheets, for example, dropping hardness of 15V from 64 to 58 Rc gets you 5 more ft-lbs (in a c-notch test, not the same as mine) while dropping hardness of 3V from 62 to 58 Rc gets you 45 more ft-lbs.
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Yea, I noticed exactly what you mean after spending more time looking at your toughness charts. It becomes vary apparent when comparing how the toughness of L6 changes vs 3V, when going from 58rc to 59rc. I wasn't expecting such a drastic difference.
 
It's not super accurate since I don't have exact values and because some of the toughness testing was done at different RC levels, but I still find it fun to play around with. It's cool to see steels that have been highly valued over the years for their particular properties really stand out. 15V, 10V, CPM-M4, 4V, CPM-Cruwear, 3V, 14C28N, and AEB-L all really stand out to me. I was really surprised to see how poorly 1095 and Super Blue performed! I love the edge they take though. I'd love to see how S90V and K390 stack up. :)

*I left M2 off since it performed nearly identically to D2.

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I think it's interesting that ZDP-189 offers no real advantage over S110V and isn't even close in corrosion resistance.
 
AEB-L at 61rc has better edge holding, is tougher, and is more stainless, than 52100.....? Then what advantage does 52100 have over AEB-L?
 
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