Tried a new steel - 80CrV2

[D_W]

We (UK based) all chip in for a batch order and split the shipping???

Thanks @D_W the information and your explanations are very valuable. We woodworkers do tend to get ripped off by these tool salesmen / makers who make unsubstantiated claims about how great their steels are! You have proven this not to be the case and there is the proof a decent steel is out there for ALL budgets to benefit from. Thank you sir and well done!

it's hard to know what the right answer is with this stuff. I don't think most woodworking tool companies are that much interested in the steel - it's just part of the tool. LV went through a long selection process to pick what they're using now (V11) and they don't really want anyone to know what it is, at least not as public information (it's expensive, anyway, I don't think anyone else would use it, but importers could use cheap stainless steels and claim to be using it).

I don't have a furnace, which I think I'd need to get AEB-L right, but I do have AEB-L - it's a little more than this stuff, but cheaper than ground O1.I can make an iron good enough with it just in a forge to test its edge life (1.6 times that of O1), but not hard enough that I'd give one away for someone to play with.

Maybe I'll try again at lunch - heat treating stainless in a forge is sort of a forbidden practice, but I think the only thing I'd need to get it harder is a liquid nitrogen dewar - maybe in the future. I've got some ideas to get halfway there just with a small forge and a freezer with ice buildup on the sides.

 

[D_W]

I did make an AEB-L stainless iron at lunch. It's hard enough out of the quench to not be filed on the corners, but all of the heat treat instructions suggest I will not be able to get a fully hard iron (like over 60 out of it).

we'll see.

 

[D_W]

i've made a couple of boning knives out of this steel now based on a request from someone who hunts and more or less said "there is no good boning knife".

It's blistering sharp for knives - too bad it's not stainless, but if you don't sell them on the open market, it doesn't matter.

Neither is cosmetically finished yet in this picture, obviously, and will be handled later. The one on the right is AEB-L, a stainless that's good for knives but really needs liquid nitrogen to match hardness after temper that we're more used to in good tools. the one that I made for someone else is already out the door - he puts his own handles on knives, which is more than fine with me. The blade making is quick - handling nicely takes longer than the knife.

These knives are 1/16th inch thick, target hardness is about 61 and with things we're used to - like O1, the tip probably wouldn't survive. these two steels have better characteristics than O1 if they're accidentally bent a little in anger. And 80crv2 at high hardness sharpens similar to O1.

There's nothing that unique about knives that look hand made, except you can keep a hardness and grind a profile that nobody would offer commercially. The high hardness versions of these all seem to be tall and have a rounder point, and the ones that are pointy like this tend to have something like 420HC steel (buck knives popularized this) which is an ultra fine ultra tough steel that is hard to break, but hardness is edge rolling territory if the edge is fine.

And that was the complaint that brought up making a few in the first place - to have one that is hard and doesn't wear quickly due to deflection, but that doesn't have a screwy shape.

I think belt, steel and gas to make these is about $6 each - at the very most.