jack:
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">whack up a couple of elk and several deer without sharpening the blade</font>
You can get blades that can handle that kind of heavy bone chopping without visible damage but it is not simply due to a high performance steel. Take a simple common cheap steel like 1095 with a moderate hardness and grind it fairly thick and it will be able to do that.
To get specific, leave it say about 0.05 to 0.10" at back of the bevel and sharpen at 25-35 degrees. The exact geometry that is needed will depend on how much force you intend to chop up the bones with and how you are doing it. If you are fairly forceful and/or sloppy you might even want to go a bit thicker. Similar if you are wokring in extreme cold.
For fillet blades where you are slicing and not chopping the impacts are far less stressful as the energy is much less (becuase of the lower blade mass and your reduced effort) and the bones are not nearly as hard. You should be able to grind a much thinner profile and still be able to avoid visible damage or excessive blunting.
1095 would not be a great choice for a fillet blade even though it is a great choice for a heavy bone chopper, because it is fairly weak and a thin fillet edge would roll easily under the lateral forces across the edge. It is also not very wear resistant and the tougher skins and grating bone contacts would dull it quickly. It also rusts very quickly, but you could probably work around that to some extent.
Picking out which steel is not trivial and it is complicated by the fact that steels can have varying abilities dependent on how they are heat treated. One of the things I look for in a maker is do they vary the steel selection in a logical way based on the intended use of the various types of blade.
This is a quote from the pamphlet that Phil sent me out quite awhile ago :
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">The challenge is to select the steel that has the potential for the right balance of toughness and wear resistance and to grind and heat treat it so the goal is met.</font>
He goes on to describe why he uses the steels he does for fillet blades, kitchen knives and hunters by fitting the properties that the steels have to the abilities that these blades need to have. It is worth reading.
-Cliff
