Why is the Vintage Steel Different in Performance? I May Never Know

In all of my making of plane irons and chisels from steel ranging from 1084 to XHP, and including some very plain steels other than 1084, I still have not managed to make a plane iron that reminds me of a vintage laminated plane iron.

Is it that important? Not really – sounding like a broken record player, O1 will make any plane iron i’d ever need. 26c3 (high hardness but short edge life like white steel, sometimes still useful) and 80crv2 sort of round things out, and there’s a lot of other “OK” stuff. I think really good M2 would potentially be a good choice, but I’m not willing to try to figure out how to harden it in the open atmosphere at this point. It can probably be done, but how much it gives up vs. commercial, we really don’t want to work with things that we make compromises on.

Back to the laminated irons. The older irons of good makers (not all old irons are good) all seem to have a similar feel. Why doesn’t 1095 or W2 or 1084 seem to really be like it? I don’t know. I can send an iron to get an XRF analysis (the same method used to out PM V11 as CTS-XHP), it’s not expensive and from time to time, I can have it done for free. Even if not, it’s about $30, and I’d be more than willing to have three or four irons analyzed to see if they’re the same.

But the puzzler is that heat treat process, final temper, quench, whatever, I don’t quite end up with something that feels like an old ward or mathieson iron. They don’t wear long, but they feel different and the good ones have unbeatable stability at the edge and they sharpen easily for a given hardness due to lack of alloying.

And it’s possible that I have the equipment at this point that I’d need to actually make a laminated iron, but it’s just not going to happen.

There are so many variables

I’ve got a sinful number of taper and parallel irons acquired on the assumption that I may make 100 or so bench planes. I sort of tailed off of that, and ended up making irons now, which I also thought I would do. I like the style of the old irons and the feel and their geometry, but I can grind a same shape iron now, and I could leave scale on an iron and tool marks so that it didn’t look new, and I can stamp an iron so that it doesn’t look like something that was laser etched or printed on.

But I’m willing at this point to slide the “make it like the old irons” idea off to the side, and use what’s available and do what seems best. As in, resigning to probably not ever knowing the cause for the difference. It could be all kinds of things, like:

• the old irons that were laminated were probably actually water quenched thanks to the lamination preventing cracking. Water quenching water hardening solid steels in plane iron and chisel profiles is something you’ll learn not to do quickly.
• the old irons were probably made of a different type of ore, at least from what I’ve been told. There are two common types – hematite and magnetite. Before a chemist would tell me that processing removes this, I’d probably have to do an A+B test, and a very skilled chemist is who brought this up to me. One with a relatively open mind.
• It could be the process of forging that makes things different – and I don’t mean in a “oh, you can’t get the same toughness with cut, thermal treat and shape” or anything like that. It’s not magic, but more a matter of whether or not something happens as the steel is heat treated so that it can be forge welded to wrought iron and the steel itself drops some of its carbon content

I really don’t know and the answer to these kinds of questions aren’t horseshoes to me. You may recall my comments ranting on about people who give answers that they feel like are good enough without knowing if they’re correct. Things like speculating that the Seaton Chest is incomplete or whatever else – if you don’t know, then you continue to seek and even when you prove something, you may have proved *a way* but not *the way*.

Not Sending Everyone Out

This discussion isn’t intended to send people looking for Wards, Howarths and Mathiesons and so on. The best way to get 30 really good irons is to buy 100 irons – this isn’t a buy once and you’ve got it kind of sport.

And this discussion doesn’t sidestep but rather ignores the fascination with abrasive wear resistance. I’ve abandoned woodworking with machines followed by “death by a thousand thin shavings”, it’s not practical for a hand tool woodworker, and a hand tooler learns to take as much as they can efficiently without horsing things around, so the jack plane works thick shavings, the try plane continues to work relatively thick shavings and the smoother follows it and has to do almost nothing. This sort of solves the mystery of why nobody got fascinated with alloying until recently, and why alloying that was provided industrially didn’t actually improve anything. Recall from the alloying talk that A2 and O1 are early to early-mid 1900s steels, and tungsten steels were also turn of the century. They didn’t make a mark in hand tools because they didn’t offer a skilled worker anything.

And purchasing something like a ward iron to replace your PM-V11 may not yield what you want if your planes plane between 2 and 1/2 thousandth shavings most of the time, and you sand everything thereafter.

Lastly, what’s funny in all of this is that I’d have figured “well, I’ll find something that approximates old English steel without too much issue, but never master the Japanese stuff”. Well, 26c3 is almost identical to White 1. I don’t think anyone would use the two in a blind test and tell the difference.