A Blast from the Past

It’s not often these days there is much worthwhile on forums. Sawmillcreek is just one of the flavors, but in a decidedly fake egalitarian environment. That fakeness was to attract advertisers and the kind of traffic advertisers want. But, once in a while, there was some gold there.

I have a serious distaste for the forum for several reasons. One, it’s framed to look like it’s not for profit (with .org, and various “pens for soldiers” things, that the ownership gets surprisingly territorial about given that’s actually supposed to be a not for profit). You’ll find folks often willing to speak up if they mentioned any other pen charities on SMC or mentioned they couldn’t find where to send pens so they sent them to another one. They just won’t speak up on SMC. When you contribute, and especially in the past when people ran around everywhere with “please contribute” in their signature footers, you find your contribution goes to a for-profit entity, the forum owner’s sign company.

What set me off at the time was rudeness to George Wilson. George is the equivalent of running into a +7 (like below par average) golfer on a public golf course. Eventually, the shankers and wankers don’t want someone like that around, and they want to talk about some tip they learned and do it without someone who knows what they’re talking about squinting. If George said something in a definitive way, it drew heat. If he said something about one of the gurus, like Chris Schwarz, people would literally register or resurrect their old IDs to go there and try to get him in trouble. I suppose the unexposed person may not know the difference between carrying water for Schwarz and seeing a legitimate master who is selling nothing to anyone (unlike Schwarz, who is willing to sell you bloated price plans or get you to pay to see yet another iteration in his “the right way” sharpening nonsense).

Between that and the “everyones’ mileage varies” crap that was the norm there, and the fact that it appears to be a for profit site always complaining about people not giving enough to it, I was out. It sucks, at least in my opinion, and it’s pretty much dead as a doornail now.

But this is about XHP….

..and the fact that it’s V11 and so on, at least nominally by composition. It strikes me as even a little more interesting that the resident psychologist was so involved in this thread and later went on to tell everyone that it’s much the same as 10V or A11 is V11. These statements aren’t remotely close to true. The latter two are vanadium carbide steels and XHP is a high chromium carbide volume steel.

Lee Valley is an advertiser at SMC, which is why it’s odd that remains. All forums favor advertisers. SMC goes further by blocking out non-advertisers from answering questions from posters. I don’t think most posters know that, but more than one retailer or company person got a hold of me elsewhere and flatly stated that their IDs were ghosted because they wouldn’t sign on to advertise. The terms refer to it as a “non-competitive” advertising atmosphere. The slant there while I was posting in favor of Grizzly was humorous, but that was fortunately out of view in the hand tool section.

How did I get to posting about this? I still browse over there once in a while. I noticed yet another sharpening thread there browsing this morning very early morning, but it doesn’t have the same fervor it used to. It went from cold water to water bottle temperature, let alone to any smoke or fire, and quickly got to people who make one post a month threatening to leave. The same kind of people who would only make a post to complain about George. Notice there is useful information in the post I linked, but no such thing really appears at this point because people move on and there’s nothing attractive to bring a new Kees or Patrick Chase in, and both of those guys XRF-ed V11 to find that it was XHP. Someone else in the US mid-south also did the same thing.

One of the things that came up in the thread was that “the crystal structure of V11 is finer than older steels” or something along those lines, and “finer than O1 and A2”. I wonder why people believe this. Maybe it was said in ad copy or given as a platitude about powder steels. Powder metallurgy is fine. Very little of what’s made from it is as fine as the more plain ingot steels. The purpose of PM is to take something that makes a real turd of an ingot steel, like D2 or up from there, and spray out a zillion little tiny particle ingots so that the constituents don’t cool into gigantic apex killing poorly dispersed carbides. 154CM vs. CPM154 is a good example, but it goes up from there. XHP/V11 is “more” than D2 or 154CM, and 154CM is already as an ingot steel, something that will not even take an edge off of a stone without letting parts of its edge go. CPM 154, the powder version is kind of like XHP. Actually, PM D2, CPM 154 and XHP are sort of a family of increasing amounts of carbon and varying levels of chromium among them.

I found this old SMC thread because I googled “XHP micrograph grain boundary”. I didn’t find any grain boundary pictures. You can find pictures of XHP micrographs and compare them to O1 if you’d like and note how much finer O1 is. The discussion of what the micrographs tell you other than being able to see a much more coarse carbide structure in XHP is a little more nuanced, so we won’t get into it. But given XHP soaks in grain enlarging temperatures as part of its heat treatment process, I seriously doubt that the average grain size is less either. Important here if you’re not a steel person to see the carbides as kind of hard BBs and the grains as relative clods of compacted dirt, though the clods can be smaller than the BBs.

When I tested plane irons actually planing about 40,000 feet of wood in 2019, I came up with wear results about the same as the machine Kees made to abrade the steel. It sharpens more slowly than A2 or O1. This isn’t a surprise. We constantly hear about how it sharpens faster and is finer than other steels. Both of these are false.

I miss the days of useful information coming out of forums. To have a discussion like that on Reddit is gone. The woodworking psychologist may yet again forget about what XHP is and call it the same thing as some Vanadium high speed steel, but that’s just part of online life.

I know XHP and V11 are the same thing based on three people doing an XRF analysis, despite Lee Valley’s desire to try to keep the alloy secret after spending money on a picking and testing process. I’ll leave that there, because plenty of people think they invented an alloy or developed one. They can see this and correct me in writing if they are willing to do that. Woodworking companies don’t develop alloys, and XHP had enough positive press in the knife world that I think Lee Valley should’ve just said what it is and boasted about it.

So, I know it all?

No, I know a lot more now. I’ve tested a lot of stuff side by side, and I’ve found plenty of folks doing other ingot steels not that great and have been nonplussed.

In 2013, several years before this, I was totally on board with the newer stuff having to be better than the older. After all, that’s what we were told, we can analyze it, nobody can do things by hand unless they want to be grampy under the shade tree, and of course people were tortured and suffering in 1830, and they must’ve been dumb.

Except none of that’s really true. So it’s having come from that and getting my eyes opened a little bit. The first thing that opened my eyes was planing with a few irons and seeing the edges, and then planing with a butcher iron from around 1830 that was little used, and then seeing the most uniform spectacular even wear and what looked 10 times finer than anything in the new irons if chromium was involved. And finer than O1. I was stunned.

The thread on sawmillcreek has a little of every flavor. Old is always better all the way to “they were dumb and of course new is better” to the old engineering platitude “we could just always make it better”. I can’t really make tools better than Ward did, even if I cheat and use 26c3. And I’m using what someone may have made on a Tuesday afternoon at Ward, not my best weekend effort with a fresh head.