Help with Steel

[Stephen Downie]

I've been tooling up and tinkering around with some scrap C1018 steel and knife kits to get some idea of working with metal. I think I'm about ready to start thinking about making an order to get some knife quality steel. I'm hoping that with a few years of practise I would like to go professional and to that end I'd like to begin working with the stuff the big dogs like to work with. That brings up two questions. 1) Is there a preference in the high end makers / buyers for a particular kind of steel? -Damascus notwithstanding. Carbon alloys or Stainless? 2) Am I delusional to think that a neophyte such as myself would have the technical chops to work with such a potentially difficult material and should stick to easier steels such as O-1 before I jump in the deep end. Thanks for any advice.

PS
I did a search on this topic and didn't come up with much, if there was a thread I missed please don't

[Ray Rogers]

You make it sound like the 'easier' steels such as O1 will somehow produce a knife of lesser quality. Simply not so. Randall knives are made from O1 and many of the 'big dogs' use O1, 1095, 1084, 440C or other simple steels and get great results. Part of the reason is that they are all fine cutlery steels and part is due to careful heat treating. The heat treatment will make or break any knife blade, sometimes literally, from any steel.

What steel you use will depend on how you make knives (forging, stock removal), the preference of the customer, the type of knife and it's intended application, and other factors. Folders, for example, are predominantly made with stainless while the big camp knives and choppers are more likely to be carbon steels. Whatever steel you use, use it a lot until you know it very well. That's more important that which steel you use.

Finally, if you are considering going full time here's some advice: be sure you have a brisk business going before you leave your day job. It takes years for most of us to build knife making into a business large enough to replace a job with steady income....

[Stephen Downie]

Hi Ray,

Thanks for the advice, that was exactly what I was looking for. I didn't mean to imply that steels that were easier to work with are by any means inferior. I've heard nothing but good things about O-1 etc, I was more interested in what the perception of the market was. It just goes to show that I should have realized that there were different materials used and differing opinions in different sectors of the market. There certainly is a lot to take in. I'm still in my baby steps phase; researching, reading, experimenting and getting tooled up, thankfully I've got the majority of the tools I need from my current job.

PS
I was on your site yesterday, I really love the design of your Razor folder.

[mete]

The beginner steels are 5160, 1070, 1080.These are easy to forge and HT and are somewhat 'forgiving'. After learning these you can go to W-1, W-2, O-1, 52100 , A-2 and others .Stainless steels require precise temperature and time control requiring proper equipment.

[Ray Rogers]

Stephen,

Even though most of us aspire to heat treating our own blades, there's no stigma in the market to sending your stainless blades to someone like Paul Bos for heat treatment. There aren't too many commercial places that will HT a carbon blade because it's just too easy for people to do it themselves but there are several that process stainless blades. There is a market for that for the reasons Mete listed.

Thanks, the Rayzor is my most popular knife and I make a ton of them...

[Stephen Downie]

Thanks Ray,

I've already got Paul's site bookmarked. As things progress I'd like to get into hardening my own blades, but at this early stage I'm not quite ready to drop $1000 + on the equipment. I've learned the hard way to buy the best equipment I can afford the first time around even if it means saving and waiting. At the moment I'm more interested in making fixed blade knives though I might get into folders later. Baby steps and all that. I'm curious though, what is the reason for stainless being so popular for folders and camping knives being made from carbon? Anything aside from market preference?

[Alan L]

In my opinion folks like stainless for folders because they won't take care of a carbon steel blade on a pocketknife, and thus they discolor or rust. Or maybe too many of us had a rusty pocketknife as a kid and never want it to happen again?

People are more likely to wipe down a big fixed blade.

[Ray Rogers]

Partly what Alan just said, especially on the pocket knives. But, on the big camp knives, survival knives, basically anything that will be used to chop or be subjected to extreme lateral forces will be a carbon steel knife. The reason for this is in the heat treatment. Carbon steel can more easily and more effectively be heat treated to a spring hardness (very tough but less edge holding) than stainless steel. In the best examples you'll see differentially treated blades where the edge is at full working hardness but the back is at spring hardness. This is the best of both worlds - good edge holding and considerable toughness too, and it can't be done with stainless.

In the elite of tough blades you'll find salt pot heat treatments that can be used to create bainite blades. Not quite the edge holding but the absolute toughest and most durable that a piece of steel can be. I've only heard of this technique being done one carbon steels. It might work on stainless too but I suspect that the higher temperatures required to heat treat stainless might present a significant obstacle for the salts ...

[Doug Lester]

This is just my 10 cents worth (read: 2 cents adjusted for inflation ), a lot of the problem, at least with the general public is education, or maybe re-education. The average Joe Lunchpail knows that the best steel for a knife is stainless, especially the newest steels like ZPD189 and CPM S30V. Why do they know this, and I know this because I use to be part of this group, is because that is what the cutlery industry has told them. What we have to do is to re-educate the public; to inform them that these wonder steels have their drawbacks. These steels are more brittle and the flip side of extreme wear resistance is difficulty in sharpening. We have to let people know that it's really not all that hard to keep a blade rust free and that light rusting will not damage a blade if removed promptly. Stains on a blade don't effect the funtion of the tool.

Granted, we will probably not reach the average Joe Lunchpail because we cannot compete against the price point that industrial manufactures can put out their products at, but for everyone that we do reach, we expand our potential market.

My rant for the day.

Doug Lester

[Stephen Downie]

Thanks all for the great responses. This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm looking for.

[NJStricker]

The best thing you can do is make yourself known among your customers as a maker that makes good quality knives, consistently.

Knife buyers/collectors can be a fickle lot. There is a group out there that will rush to order a knife from the newest maker to get an article in Blade or other knife magazine, or from the maker that is the most talked about in some of the "groupie" forums. A year later, they are off to the next great maker. Some of these guys are re-selling their new acquisitions within months to fund their next purchase.

Those guys are as fickle with their steels as they are with the makers they buy from. To them, if you are not using the newest "hot" techno-uber-steel, you are not in the hot crowd to buy from.

Some of those steels are good, some might even be called great. But as was posted above, there is nothing wrong with good carbon steels or even 440C stainless. Make a good knife from them, find buyers who recognize the quality of your work, and those types of buyers will keep coming back and will spread the word.

[Stephen Downie]

Originally Posted by Armory414

The best thing you can do is make yourself known among your customers as a maker that makes good quality knives, consistently.

Knife buyers/collectors can be a fickle lot. There is a group out there that will rush to order a knife from the newest maker to get an article in Blade or other knife magazine, or from the maker that is the most talked about in some of the "groupie" forums. A year later, they are off to the next great maker. Some of these guys are re-selling their new acquisitions within months to fund their next purchase.

Those guys are as fickle with their steels as they are with the makers they buy from. To them, if you are not using the newest "hot" techno-uber-steel, you are not in the hot crowd to buy from.

Some of those steels are good, some might even be called great. But as was posted above, there is nothing wrong with good carbon steels or even 440C stainless. Make a good knife from them, find buyers who recognize the quality of your work, and those types of buyers will keep coming back and will spread the word.

Thanks for the excellent advice. I've been through the exact same thing as a custom tobacco pipe maker. There are a lot of similarities between the two markets, the main thing in both markets seems to be to make sure you are putting out a quality product before you open you doors for customers. Quality -or lack of it- will always show. I'd imagine it will take a lot of research and mistakes before I hang up my shingle. Until then I'm off to pick up 6 ft of O-1.

[pipecrafter]

Hey Stephen! Fancy meeting you here.

I'm really partial to 1075, 1095, and O-1. Of those, O-1 is the easiest to grind and heat treat. And if you get it a little thin around the edges, O-1 is very, very forgiving during the quench. Another benefit of O-1 is how easy it is to heat treat. On a small knife, I can heat the blade to critical between two MAPP torches, drop it in used motor oil, and it comes out hard as heck. Temper for an hour at 300 twice, and it's a perfectly good knife.

You also don't need anything particularly expensive or complex to heat treat carbon steels. Check out this unit I made a few months back:
http://www.loneadmin.com/forge_build/Welcome.html
It works a treat on smaller blades. Hardly cost me anything either.

[Stephen Downie]

Hiya Kurt,

It's funny how many pipe makers seem to be moonlighting as knife makers as well. I'm half expecting Lars, and Rolando to pop in here too. Thanks for the link to you nifty little forge! It looks like a great little design. I could see myself building something pretty similar. I'd like to get a Paragon Furnace at some point, but until then that looks like a great and inexpensive option. I've got 6 ft of 1/4 x 2 inch O-1 to play with now and I'm itching to get started.

[Ray Rogers]

Pipecrafter's forge looks like a variation of my Mini Forge (http://www.rayrogers.com/mini_forge.htm) which, in turn, is a variation of the well known coffee can forge. He's right, doesn't take much to make a small forge to heat treat small blades. Basically, build a forge body and then decide how you'll heat it. As Pipecrafted shows, a plain MAP torch is sufficient. I went a little farther and built a small battery powered forced air burner but it wasn't really necessary for heat treating...