Month: June 2024

This should be a simple post except I don’t know the exact answer, so it won’t be that simple.

What brings this up? I browse SMC (the blue forum) about once a week. I used to post there but lost my taste for the site and requested to have my ID ghosted a while ago.

However, it’s still interesting to read because topics like this come up – and they just get butchered. ECE calls the steel Chrome Vanadium, and when those two words come in a row, we’re off to the races with a bunch of explanations that make no sense.

What Does the Average Person Think?

A whole bunch of things, but two points come up that aren’t correct, and they’re constant. First, that chrome vanadium steel is highly alloyed. Second, that it’s relatively low carbon.

This must be a product of people googling for answers and not getting far enough outside of the US. If you read about chrome vanadium steel in the US, you get something like “it is AISI 6150 with chromium ranging from 0.8-1.1% and carbon of 0.5%”

Wikipedia will tell you that. As far as I know, that’s a steel that’s commonly used to make wrenches. I doubt it’s in many edged tools and if any, it may be in really cheap chisels. Since wrenches get levered, it makes sense to use a short carbon steel so that the composition is uniform and simple to heat treat.

What is it Elsewhere?

ECE planes are made in Europe. A whole family of steels can be had in Europe where the composition is a fairly plain steel with manganese, chromium and vanadium. There are 0.5% carbon varieties and there are steels with too much carbon to be used as tool steels, that I would assume are for precipitation hardening. Like steel for pipe with carbon in the range of 2%.

This group includes drill rod type steels and Silver Steel (115crV3) which is a surplus carbon steel around 1.1-1.2% carbon with about 0.5% chromium and 0.15% vanadium. The total alloying outside of iron and carbon is probably similar to percentage of O1 steel that is manganese. Of course, O1 steel has other stuff beyond that, like Chromium and tungsten and sometimes vanadium, a trace.

80crv2, almost one of my favorite steels, is about 0.8% carbon with 0.5% chromium and a small amount of vanadium that I can’t recall, but it’s probably also about 0.2 or 0.25%.

How do I know? The chromium is added to these steels to improve the iron carbides, and I suspect how I’d translate what it’s doing is to sequester iron in carbides, which can lead to improved toughness. Chromium also adds some hardenability, so when it appears, manganese usually is shorted to some extent. 1084, for example, has a load of manganese. 1095, which often has some chromium addition has about half or a little bit above half of the amount of manganese in 1084. O1 has a chromium addition about like the european plain chrome vanadium steels, but double or triple the manganese – allowing it to harden more easily, and the spec allows vanadium at 0.15% – the same amount that is in some “chrome vanadium” steels.

Back to the point – the chromium in chrome vanadium steels improves the carbides, and vanadium prevents grain growth when it exists in small amounts. In my opinion for woodworking non-lathe steels, if vanadium exists in an amount that starts to create large vanadium carbide volume, the steels are a pain in the ass. Magnacut and CPM 3V and 4V may be exceptions to this because the carbides are small, but all of those still leave me cold for different reasons.

So, now we’re aware – chrome vanadium steels outside of our wrongly applied wrench steel are a bunch of very plain steels that have been made a little easier to use and probably to the extent that quality is improved – vs. the older water hardening steels. Faults of plate martensite are less (brittle steel) and grain growth is a bit slower.

You can hate the name chrome vanadium, but it’s likely anything you get that’s production made with it in a small amount is probably a point harder and a lot more consistent.

So, Still – What’s in the ECE and Ulmia Irons?

If I had to guess at a party without ever seeing anything, given the origin, I’d say something like 80crv2. However, 80crv2 – which I think is probably what’s in pfeil tools, can go from being a little rubbery and edge rolling if it’s short of hardness to pretty crisp. it kind of runs out of steam around 62 for consumer purposes, but at 62 it’s really nice. It’s super uniform with tiny little carbides. In that picture, very highly magnified, the carbides themselves are barely above 1 micron in scale. They are blurred at the bottom of the picture but at the top left, you can see how tiny they look. If they’re any smaller, they won’t reflect light back and the surface looks smooth, like AEB-L does here. Both of these edges have planed a bunch of footage of wood, but the aeb-l edge just doesn’t have carbides big enough to reflect light, so they don’t – it looks smooth.

What makes 80crv2 not be my guess is I have no ECE irons now, but I bought primus plane or three like other people do, and then was just really unimpressed with the iron. The life was short – shorter than a stock stanley iron, and doing the tried and true 35 degree final microbevel back then still resulted in nicking.

Long ago, Brent Beach did an interesting test of various irons. Some looked perfectly uniform with wear, and the ECE iron did not. I saw similar behavior to what’s here – it was OK, and then there would be a nick. Is there enough vanadium in it to make a few disparate carbides like Cru Forge (that info courtesy of Larrin Thomas)? I don’t know – Cru Forge had vanadium added at 0.75% and that’s enough to add vanadium carbides with some size. But like A2 with chromium, not enough to add a uniform array.

I have no idea what ECE’s alloy is, but what I do recall about the feel is it could’ve been better. Whatever the alloy was, it could’ve been heat treated with a little more bite. ECE responded to someone in that thread that they prefer to not state the alloy they’re using. I don’t blame them – there’s no reward for it. if you go out and price chrome vanadium steels in europe, they’re in the dollar a pound range for drill rod, maybe two. From china, they’re FOB 30 or 40 cents a pound. Not giving up what’s being used prevents people from offering opinions, uneducated or not.

it does seem like a missed opportunity. People would glow about 80crv2 at 61 or 62 hardness. it probably falls short of O1 in edge life by 10% or so, but when it’s at the upper end of its hardness range, the wear is just so even and everything is routine – the iron cuts sweetly all the way until clearance runs out. Just like you’ll experience with older English steels and well done O1 steel.

But we probably should recall that these planes made their way through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In a late 70s year, what else was out there as competition? It isn’t the kind of poor hardness and lack of edge life that I remember that would really bother me so much as it would be dealing with an iron that develops mystery nicks like I recall, and like Beach shows.

I wish I still had the iron – patterning the carbides like seen in the picture above would let us know if there are just a few and they’re far apart, or if they’re more plentiful suggesting a higher carbon content than one would guess at first.

It’s been a while since I posted anything on here. Spring has been busy and I have been in the shop some, but overall when I get overloaded with work, life and trying to carve out time for anything, I just stop managing time well. Or I should say even worse than usual.

So, sitting back and writing something coherent seems an impossible goal vs. scrolling in spare time and becoming even more jelly-minded.

I anticipate that I’ll be back to more regular posting at some point, but not in the next several weeks.

If I’m in this kind of self-described irresponsible but infrequent kind of situation – you know the type if you’ve been in it, when every second of your waking abilities could be consumed by something else, but you still sneak in the shop for a few hours to evade reality, I tend to do small things that people propose rather than binding myself into some big time soaking interest.

That’s been washing tung oil to see if it will dry harder and faster, a few odds and ends that friends have requested, and some knives.

Above is a pair of knives made out of 52100 that will fit a common mill knife handle. I didn’t even know what a mill knife is. These knives are a case, which has become uncommon for me at this point, where I don’t know for sure if I didn’t affect the temper when grinding. I’ve gotten good at not having that happen, but strangely enough when freehanding these bevels with a belt sander and a spray bottle, finer ceramic paper is actually better than coarse paper. Coarse is far better dry.

Why? The spray bottle is leaving a film of water on the belt, and you spray intermittently on the tool for two reasons – to make sure the water doesn’t boil, and to keep the belt wet. On coarse paper, the water ends up residing between the piles of ceramic grit and I think it just isn’t as effective.

I’ll send these out, anyway. I can make another pair if needed. They would be fine for me, but I kind of feel like if I make something for someone else, it ought to be the best they could get and the standard is higher than things I make for myself.

then someone I don’t know in England asked if I would make them “a knife”. Since they won’t go in a heavy duty knife, I said I would make them a knife for cost of materials, but I just needed to know what they want. By the time exchanges were done over the last few days, it turned out they wanted four.

these are 26c3. It’s not like it’s a burden to take on something like this. Everything you make is a little different and good can be done on the first try. Better than just good takes a little thinking. In the case of these knives, the induction forge will heat the steel as long as it’s around 0.1″. The bevels are ground on after the fact, but I have no interest in heating a big square and grinding a whole lot more than the bevel, so they are cut near to a point but with a blunt edge. That point, the induction forge comes a little short on. So for the last of the work in the heat treatment process, I have the torch going again. Which is a little bit of an art – you’re pushing to get the whole knife in good shape, and then get the thing into the forge for really only about 5 seconds to get the tip where it should be and then quench. if you don’t do it, the point is soft. Who wants a knife that will be good after a tenth of an inch is ground off? Not me. These should be blistering. At the same time, it would be easy to overheat the tip because it brightens color very fast. Instead of being soft, it would break off easily.

A mama-bear situation occurs in the middle, and figuring that stuff out is what makes you really own the knowledge rather than just reading about it. It’s what I like.

These are also all quenched in brine now. Brine has a bad reputation, but in fast transition steels, it’s just better. 26c3 is not difficult to heat treat, but it’s fast transition. If you push the heat up a level, it will do OK in fast oil like parks. But you can back off a bit from that and get it in a faster quench like brine and it will just be shitting in tall cotton level. That brings another obligation – no cracks and control warp. Which I’ve figured out as part of this.

The 26c3 knives are 64/65 hardness after a double 400F temper. that’s just stellar. They’re not undertempered, they are just very crisp and will break no more easily than would O1 knives at 61 hardness. they probably will tolerate a little more abuse than O1 would at that.

For scale, those knives above are 0.1″ thick (the first two are 0.8″) and all but the one narrow knife are around 0.75″ wide. They’re all pretty substantial.

If my brain is tired and I don’t feel like inflicting gen. pop with the normal disorderly stuff that I usually post, for some reason I can still go to the shop and manage to do something useful with things like these striking knives. if there was legitimate money in making random tools like this, it would almost seem like I’m doing the wrong thing for a living. But 10 hours a day of freehand work and tired eyes, I’d probably want to go back to making a living at a desk.

Hope everyone who reads here is doing well. No crisis here or anything that caused the lack of posts, just lack of all of the ingredients that make “i’m going to go post something” happen.