New Steel – Pop’s Pro Cut

You may think the name of this steel has something to do with big box store lawn mowing blades, or some hair clipper system for old men to save money, but it’s not that.

Pop’s is a knife steel supplier that best I can figure, provides a fair number of offerings that New Jersey Steel Baron also sells, but other knife making supplies and steels. And I could be a little confused here, as I think USA Knifemaker also sells 1095 and other Buderus origin steels that come from NJSB. I buy a lot directly from NJSB, but have gotten 50100 steel from USA knifemaker, and fairly sure, I got Apex Ultra (haven’t used it yet – think really high hardness slightly alloyed steel) from Pops. I can’t recall if there’s an apostrophe and am not going to go look at this point.

So, you won’t be surprised to hear that Larrin Thomas (Magnacut alloy chef and owner of the knifesteelnerds website) came up with this alloy in response to a request to make an 80crv2 alloy that’s some improved. 80crv2 is slightly shorter carbon than 1084 and with 0.5% chromium and some vanadium added to, presumably, improve consistency of heat treatment and improve toughness a little. I’ve mentioned it on here before and suspect that it is what Pfeil uses or Pfeil may have made a slight variation on it.

What Larrin did was cut the chromium back a little, add tungsten, and a substantial amount of nickel and keep the vanadium. Larrin has a very in-depth article about it here.

What’s the point of it?

Nickel steels are a type of steel we don’t see much in woodworking tools, at least not hand woodworking tools. Nickel stays in solution in steel and doesn’t make carbides or anything, but it does allow the dislocation of grains to occur more easily, which results in steel that doesn’t crack and break as easily when bent. So, the point of it seems to be to improve toughness and ductility. This isn’t really what we want with woodworking tools – we want steel that doesn’t move, but to the extent that toughness improving elements allow us to go higher in hardness and still have enough toughness, it may be a fair trade. I don’t know the answer to that yet as 15n20 (probably common in bandsaw blades) and other high nickel steels seem to be short in carbon and short carbon edges aren’t really that great for strength and edge stability.

You can read a lot of the same stuff in Larrin’s article, and Larrin knows far more about steel and especially what makes a good knife steel than I do. 15n20 is used in pattern welded knife billets quite a bit, but it doesn’t offer us much because it can get, in theory, to relatively high hardness by having tempering shorted, and still be a little harder to break than you would expect. However, I’ve noticed with steels done like this, maybe the toughness testing machine gives a good number, but the behavior of a fine edge isn’t that great. It doesn’t matter as much with knives as you’re rarely going to pull a pocket knife out and worry about minor edge defects, but if your pocket knife breaks, you’ll fret it a lot. We want wear of an edge only and defects of any type to a bare minimum.

I bought a bar of this stuff to try. It’s quite possible that it will be an interesting plain steel for plane irons because it has a little extra edge life more in line with something like A2 without the ugliness of A2’s carbide distribution. There’s also some ability to manipulate it and get varying levels of toughness at the same hardness, which is unusual.

Larrin’s view of this steel is that you can err several hundred degrees and get a good result courtesy of the ability of the steel to harden easily but also with some grain pinning from tungsten and vanadium, it’s a little more tolerant of overheating. I think this is misplaced, this need to have such a wide margin, for anyone with any significant experience who is willing to snap samples. Larrin would see something like O1 as difficult to heat treat by hand, but it isn’t unless you try to imitate a heat treating oven, and that’s where my difference in opinion lies. I know a lot less about steel than Larrin, but I have not had trouble with heat treating steels without having a temperature hold. I think this idea that we should avoid the overshot method (we overshoot temperatures in exchange for reduced time, and the only burden is testing a little to figure out what works) isn’t that great.

However, the forgiving nature of this steel isn’t going to hurt us and the only real issue at this point is what can we do in the shop with it, and is it worthwhile? For chisels, the answer is no – it’s listed no thicker than 3/16ths, but that happens to be a great thickness for taper plane irons, and it may have some merit there. It’s not terribly expensive, but it’s not cheap, and it does suffer from the infrequent disparate tungsten carbide, which is what plagues japanese blue steels to a wider degree. We’ll see if that’s an issue, too.

It’s a steel that will even air harden if the starting point is right (high heat), though it won’t if it’s not pushed temperature wise. I think that’s also interesting, but the air hardening may be superficial. What I really want to know is if I can get cryo-like tempered hardness by heat treating with brine, and whether or not it will tolerate that.

If it tolerates brine, it’s an excellent alternative to O1 and 125cr1 in thick wooden plane irons, both of which I’ve used and both are fine, but something different is always nice.

I also think it’s nice that someone is introducing basic steels at this point designed for blades, because it’s been a very long time since we’ve seen that. I hope it becomes more popular if it’s good for our purposes, as that may branch out into it becoming available in rounds or thicker cross sections intended for full forging. I really like to forge chisels out of a single piece of steel vs. forge welding on a bolster, but the number of suitable steel rounds out there now is small, and the knife community has moved toward flat bar stock. Good for them, but not good for us making one-piece chisels with an integral steel faceted bolster.

In summary, this is basically a new not-hard-to-sharpen steel that has excellent toughness prospects, some additional edge life in a tester (we’ll see about in a plane iron) and it doesn’t venture into trying to blast its way up a catra chart with an edge that’s full of carbides that can be detrimental to stability or uniformity. 80crv2 and other plain steels are typically cheaper than O1 from a western origin, and this stuff bumps up to be about the same price as O1. A good situation given it’s not going to be widely distributed to a million customers, and anything that comes out in small volume can be more expensive than this just due to lack of availability. We all know what people assume about rarity due to lack of desirability or preference – it’s inferred to mean that people are dumb and there’s some expensive alternative that’s “better” when it isn’t.