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- Jul 30, 2006
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If you hate stainless and would never buy a stainless GEC, please move on and stay out of the thread.
This thread is not about carbon steel vs. stainless.
Some folks here in Traditional prefer stainless blade steel. GEC doesn't make many.
GEC has said that they won't run stainless because the 440C is hard on their tooling. This is a true statement. However, only Queen used 440C for their traditional pocket knives. Other companies used 440A. The old Schrade catalogs say that they hardened 440A to 58HRC. Phil Gibbs, former designer at Camillus, has told me that Camillus did the same. 440A at 57-58 is pretty good stuff. A bit better than Buck's 420HC, which Buck runs at 58-59.
440A does not have carbides. It's a bit tough to stamp because the annealed hardness is still high. But it should not cause undue wear to the tooling. Unfortunately, 440A has a bad reputation because so many other manufacturers have run it soft. So that's a negative for that choice.
A popular alloy which does not contain carbides and can be fine blanked is Sandvik 14C28N. This alloy has high corrosion resistance, takes a wicked fine edge and can be hardened to 60HRC. The downside of this alloy is that it is less well known outside of the modern knife realm. This is a modern alloy and I've not seen anyone use it for traditional patterns with the exception of one custom maker.
There are other Alloys which would not cause undue wear on the tooling, but which would be stainless and perform well.
So the question, would anyone other than me buy a stainless GEC knife in something other than 440C?
This thread is not about carbon steel vs. stainless.
Some folks here in Traditional prefer stainless blade steel. GEC doesn't make many.
GEC has said that they won't run stainless because the 440C is hard on their tooling. This is a true statement. However, only Queen used 440C for their traditional pocket knives. Other companies used 440A. The old Schrade catalogs say that they hardened 440A to 58HRC. Phil Gibbs, former designer at Camillus, has told me that Camillus did the same. 440A at 57-58 is pretty good stuff. A bit better than Buck's 420HC, which Buck runs at 58-59.
440A does not have carbides. It's a bit tough to stamp because the annealed hardness is still high. But it should not cause undue wear to the tooling. Unfortunately, 440A has a bad reputation because so many other manufacturers have run it soft. So that's a negative for that choice.
A popular alloy which does not contain carbides and can be fine blanked is Sandvik 14C28N. This alloy has high corrosion resistance, takes a wicked fine edge and can be hardened to 60HRC. The downside of this alloy is that it is less well known outside of the modern knife realm. This is a modern alloy and I've not seen anyone use it for traditional patterns with the exception of one custom maker.
There are other Alloys which would not cause undue wear on the tooling, but which would be stainless and perform well.
So the question, would anyone other than me buy a stainless GEC knife in something other than 440C?
