What Steel is in ECE Plane Blades?

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.