When you begin to make your own tools and branch out from O-1 steel, there’s an interesting array of alloys that can be done well in a forge. 1095, 26c3 (my favorite for chisel making, better than anything commercially available outside of Japan), 1084. Of course there are plenty of mellow steels in terms of heat treating complexity like A-2, and V11 (probably CTS-XHP).
O-1 is the first steel I ever heat treated, and it works well. In my heat treat article I advised if you’re not looking to learn much, just buy spheroidized O-1 steel, or really any good brand of O-1 steel, heat it quickly a full color past the point where it becomes nonmagnetic, quench it and temper it.
But I branched out, 26c3 was something I’d never heard of, and my results with 1084 have been mediocre as it’s not something I’m interested in using and it probably needs a simpler cycle than the one I’ve published on here.
I’ve rehardened various tools and blades over time and found as documented on here that even among three stanley irons and a chisel later, none are the same alloy. Where did all of these steels go? The answer is, I think, two parts: 1) some may not have been used by the general public in he first place whether or not they are still available, and others are out of production.
This leads us to 1095, which I expected to be a little softer and with good toughness and uniformity because the micrographs are very fine. In fact, it looks twice as fine as 26c3 when I snap samples. In my samples, it’s 1/3rd to 1/2 as tough and quenches and tempers harder than one might expect. In my case, 400ºF tempered samples came back at 63.1 c-scale hardness and relatively low toughness somewhat in line with what industrial charts would predict at that hardness. I could and may continue to experiment with it to see if I can improve the results slightly, but realistically, optimizing something that’s not ideal just leads to a little better version of the same thing. With 1095, I have a few irons that are high hardness, very crisp and easy sharpening, but they develop tiny nicks more often than I like. Put a different way, if I was running a business and had only 1095 plane irons and chisels, it would operate fine, but I’m in toolmaker mode.
1095 Knives and Saws – Knives aren’t Really 1095, Probably for the Better
Woodworkers think of 1095 as spring steel. Charts for knife companies show that “1095 isn’t a very hard steel, but it’s tough, and it’s 55 hardness” or something of that sort. The latter is just idiots collecting specs that they’ve found somewhere and making a chart, leading to more unintentional idiots presenting them on woodworking forums and making assertions. Often with the bend to them that what’s really missing in history is superior modern steels. This becomes a full lagoon of mixed animal turds once the discussion starts. I’m past that, but you can catch me once in a while going off the rails and blasting someone who claims to be an expert responding to specific questions with confident answers that make no sense and are sometimes perfectly incorrect – as in, exactly the opposite of reality.
If you have a question about steels, you’re free to ask me. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll point you to someone who does.
I’m sure this isn’t confined to woodworking.
So, back to 1095. 1095 saws are probably just that, 1095 spring steel. What is it? More or less 1% carbon, some manganese for hardenability and not a whole lot else. Spring just refers to the temper, or how hard it is. At spring temper, you can bend steel readily and if you don’t intentionally find its limit, it will return to its original shape. 1095 knives, however…..I doubt any are 1095. But many are or were marketed as that. What they really appear to be is steels that are relatively low alloy, but that have additives to improve toughness vs. 1095, and in some cases, probably to make the alloy more amenable to less costly industrial heat treatment processes.
I long believed that if I could start making things from steel, it would just be a matter of finding really plain steel (iron and carbon) to get vintage steel-like results. Like really vintage – 200 years old instead of 100, and then I could find one with higher carbon and get biting hardness and uniform wear – that is, a strong chisel edge and no nicking when try planing and finish planing. I was off base. Small amounts of alloying elements used correctly can make things easier for industrial heat treat, but they also can yield better results. We are generally talking fractions of a percent, and not like the chromium additions in huge amounts to A2, D2 or V11 (which is probably CTS-XHP) steels. If you like those steels, by all means, carry on. I don’t like them as a woodworker so I’m not inclined to use them as a toolmaker. They don’t offer anything for an experienced woodworker working with hand tools as the best they can offer is a fair exchange for sharpening and grinding efforts. If you’re a beginning, this isn’t going to make sense, but if you’re not, I’m referencing the fact that at some point, you will become so fast and accurate with sharpening that everything is proportional to time until wear resistant parts of steels don’t protect them from nicking. As soon as that’s factored in, things tilt back toward the plain steels. There are few users that I’m aware of that can take advantage of this. I know some, and I’m one of them. Most experienced woodworkers who use a lot of hand tools end up in this group – looking for fineness, edge stability and a steel that agrees well with stones.
Once you find yourself in this situation, you can ignore the folks who want to talk about bessemer converters or powder metals, or whatever else. Those are all interesting topics, but they seem to lead to the idea that something different is always better, or comments about grain size. I encountered one last week made by a self appointed expert stating that V11 (XHP) is as fine- grained as O1 steel – confidently stated. Except it’s false. V11 has a large volume of chromium carbides – exactly where it gets its wear resistant. For the volume, they’re well distributed and round. However, the micrograph shows that the carbides coarsen the overall particle size by a lot – perhaps 5 times more coarse than O1 – or more. V11 is more like taking A2, adding more carbon and a bunch of chromium and then distributing the carbides evenly. The largest carbides in both are about the same length.
Pointing out things like this (at length, it’s my style -not my chosen style, just my style) is usually not appreciated and those offended by being corrected when they’re providing not just bad opinions, but constant true factual falsehoods – those folks generally don’t like being corrected and probably don’t care if they’re correct in the first place.
Sifting through this – to the knives – phew. What’s wrong with a biting sharp knife out of 1095 that’s a little brittle? I don’t think I mentioned it above – real 1095 at high hardness would work fine as long as you don’t bend it or twist it in a pocket knife. Guess what people do. I think a huge part of the market of knives, nearly all of it, is made with the benders and icebreakers in mind. Why? Imagine you don’t know anything about knives. You open a metal container or split a piece of wood by prying and the tip breaks off. And maybe it’s part of a set. What do you do? Even if it’s years later, apparently the answer is that you complain to the manufacturer and demand a replacement.
What if you got a knife that was boring, soft and had a fat dull feeling profile. 90% of the market or greater doesn’t care. So, we all end up with knives that are less easy to break even if they aren’t as good at slicing and cutting.
What appears to be the case with Kabar and others who are known for making easy to sharpen, but a little soft, 1095 knives is that the name is used as a branding term for plain carbon steel, but the actual steel is a 1% steel that has some additives – especially chromium or chromium and vanadium.
Cure horror movie music. That’s a term – chrome vanadium – that woodworkers hate. It’s also often described as a soft steel that’s not very good because many tools made with it are proudly stamped chrome vanadium and they contain a smaller amount of carbon than we’d like because limiting carbon prevents dealing with reduced toughness that can occur if excess carbon dissolves into a steel lattice. But, there is a whole class of chrome vanadium steels where the chromium and vanadium are small amounts and the resulting steel is much more plain than even O1. Carbon can go well above 1% and these steels can be used in straight razors. However, the CrV variants that are available inexpensively in europe don’t seem to be marketed here and importing them thanks to shipping costs doesn’t make any sense.
What Does this Have to do with this Blog?
The answer is simple. Whatever alloy stanley used for the block plane iron, I’d like to find it. It looks like plain steel with a little bit of tungsten in it based on less than ideal carbide dispersion.
Whatever alloy Kabar used, I’d like to find it. I can see older spec sheets. 1% and 1.1% steels with small additions of chromium in some cases and “B” versions with a small amount of vanadium added. Very small, but enough to keep grain size fine in less than perfect heat treatment. Not enough to make a bunch of hard to sharpen vanadium carbides that are more suited to turning tools.
These steels, in this case several made by Sharon Steel, I was finally able to find. But only one alloy in one size. The rest, I’ll have to keep looking. The bottom line with these things – the 1095s in knives that aren’t 1095, is that many are gone and there isn’t a hot market for retail sale of steels that are water hardening and lower wear resistance.
So, I’m all the way up to finding one. 50-100 sharon steel – “1095” with 0.6% chromium added and maybe some other trace changes, but the chromium addition is the key. Will it be the 1095 that makes a great plane iron? It’ll have to be, because I can find it only in 3″ wide bars, 0.145″ thick and 3 feet long. it’s out of production, and the retailer selling it (USA knife maker) is just selling found old stock. Too thin for chisels, too thin for tapered plane irons, too thick for stanley irons. I can grind it into knives or make infill plane irons with it.
Unfortunately, other than one or two finds here and there, getting the feel of the steels in place 125 years ago, or pushing the hardness up on something that was well loved (like the Kabar knives), the opportunity is mostly lost to history.
This has gone long, but luckily as of this post, I have already made one infill iron from Sharon Steel 50-100. I’ll post about it separately as you may need a break. If you got to this without any pictures, ghee-whiz nonsense, or misdirection to get you to buy something that benefits me or generates a commission – congratulations. You’re probably in the minority.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 