The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is $300 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
That sounds like a great addition. Hopefully we will see something on knifesteelnerds.com about it eventually. I've really liked reading about niobium steels and I'm impressed with what it does for them. I certainly like 26c3.
At 0.1% the niobium is only for grain refining. The question will be whether that makes a difference with 26C3 since the steel has a significant amount of iron carbide (cementite) that helps with grain size in the normal heat treating range: normalizing, annealing, austenitizing, etc. So the main time where the niobium can help is at forging temperatures.
According to the phase diagram, yes. In practical terms it needs significantly more temperature than that. For very high carbon steels or high chromium steels (52100) all of the carbide isn’t dissolved when using normally recommended temperatures. Presumably this is a balance with keeping the grain size reasonable but I’ve never seen a source that gave a reason for this. Perhaps they were unaware all of the carbide wasn’t being dissolved and by the time it was experimentally determined things were already standardized. It could be an interesting area to explore to see if an excessively high normalize followed by a lower grain refining cycle would be superior. You’d have to intentionally form grain boundary carbide first before comparing the different thermal cycles.
If you are doing stock removal then indeed that is some well tailored stuff in that thickness, can't blame you for favoring thin stuff straight out of the box! And I can understand GFS for putting the emphasis for thinner stuff, their market is probably mostly for craftsmen like you and smiths with power hammers like myself must account for a smaller percentage of their sales, can't blame them that is a smart move on their part. Thing is as a smith I tend to favor thicker stock so I can hammer it down thinner if I want, forge the taper on a blade instead of grinding it to keep a lovely kurouchi finish, or make my own san mai with big chunks of steel and then draw out a billet efficiently under my anyang 33lbs, 6mm and over is very lovely for that. This being said I once did a 3 layer stack of 3mm 26c3 to get a good chunk of coresteel for a stainless san mai and it did work well, so I can't complain too much I am just nitpicking, that will probably the way I'll deal with sheffcut, I will order some soon
What temperatures would you speculate for the "excessively high" normalization? Do you think 1800 would be high enough? Or something higher?
Funny how you’re looking at new steel in that thickness range and I’m tickled to have an old two man saw blade from the early 1900s that is only 0.05” thick. I wouldn’t turn up my nose at that new Sheffcut steel though.
| C: | W: | Mn: | Cr: | Si: | P: | S: |
| 1.13% | 2.23% | 0.24% | 0.42% | 0.2% | 0.012% | 0.016% |
Looks like an interesting steel to me. Obviously steels like 1.2419, and aogami 2 come to mind when seeing it. Though from what I've picked up this wolfram special steel might have a bit better balance with the lower carbon. I could be way off though i definitely don't have as much knowledge on it as some people.
It’s a copy of Takefu V-Toku 1.
Makes sense. I recall that just being a version of aogami with a better carbon balance.
Pretty darn close to 1.2442 too... all great steels