Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel

Magnacut – Second Practical Test

The first test was a surprise, but the iron is new, the task was identical, but the planes weren’t the same, and honing was freehand.

A day or two later, cutting bed slats to go on son’s loft bed presented the opportunity to use the same Stanley no. 6 with the Magnacut iron and another plain steel iron – one I made out of 80crv2. This time, the comparison will be a little more than fair.

Edges for both irons were refreshed with secondary bevels at 32 degrees on 1000 grit diamond and then finished slightly steeper (about a degree) on 1 micron diamond on cast iron.

I would normally hand saw wood like this, but to make for a little more to do, I used a cordless circular saw to rip lengths. Without a track guiding the saw, this leaves a much sloppier cut than hand ripping, which we need so that the edges aren’t just planed clear of handsaw marks in three or four swipes.

Cap iron set: same as previous, about .02″.

Wood: 1/2 hard maple, 1/2 poplar (whatever I had to waste on bed slats)

Planing: Alternating the iron every several minutes being mindful to plane at least as much maple with 80crv2 both in actual work as well as time planed.

I made the 80crv2 iron when trying various steels for plane irons. It is marked “80CRV2 A-T” (thermal cycles), which means that it received a low nonmagnetic heat and then was stuffed in vermiculite to cool slowly, and then before hardening, I gave it a series of below-quench-heat (barely critical or subcritical) heats and then one quick high heat well past the furnace target but no soak or hold and quenched and tempered. If it was tempered hard, it would also have an “H” on it, but it doesn’t. So, it’s probably around 61 hardness at a temper – somewhere around 375-400F.

In general, you can think of 80crv2 as something the average white-collar buyer wouldn’t distinguish from O-1, but it is a steel that wears similarly long, but has better toughness. It requires a faster quench to get good results, but it’s also less expensive. It’s more highly regarded in the knife world because it will tolerate more abuse than O-1.

You can also think of it as 1084 with just enough alloying added to make it better than 1084. 1084 is very warpy, needs a very fast quench to hit its highest hardness potential, and will experience very fast grain growth giving newbies little error between growing grain and underheating and ending up with tough but too-soft steel.

For this test, I was careful to avoid any contaminants or dirt, and careful not to be careless with the planes while planing. Maple is relatively hard on edges, but I would say it’s also not totally out of the league of cherry. Whatever occurs in maple will just occur less frequently or slower in cherry. Poplar is a patsy and I’m sure it didn’t add anything here, but I needed a few more boards.

First, the Magnacut Pictures

Note, I didn’t take pictures of initial edges. It becomes too much in terms of things to look at. The sharpening process and initial edges look the same as the magnacut in the first test. All pictures are again, the backs of the irons at the edge. There’s a second motivation here – I think i like 80crv2 better all around than O1, but I’m not sure, and in the back of my head is whether or not its additional toughness may be a detriment. I haven’t used any of these mule irons too much other than just to compare. I expected that a steeper honing guide edge would perhaps help Magnacut and different wood and a different task may help eliminate issues that are one-time in nature. E.g., if there was something in the face of the cherry that I wasn’t aware of or who knows what else.

Magnacut – 150x – edge wear on an undamaged section. The sections
“coming unglued” are wear. They don’t wipe off. Undamaged lengths weren’t uncommon, but they weren’t close to uninterrupted, either, unfortunately.

Magnacut – 150x – edge wear and typical minor deflection. This is no big deal and will probably be removed with regular honing. If all of it looked like this, it’s possible that additional planing would round the edge and the damage would stop.

Magnacut – 150x – more typical damaged sections. Damage of this size (at the bottom) leaves visible lines and you’re unlikely to hone the damage out with a normal maintenance honing.

Magnacut – 150x – worst damage. Within 10 minutes of planing, the planed edges were loaded with lines, but one was prominent. I knew I’d find something like this. There was no “big knot” or anything that caused this, so I don’ know if it started somewhere and propagated or occurred all at one time. You will spend a couple of minutes on a coarse stone to remove this and be back to the grinder with much less honing. Too, the surface that’s left isn’t acceptable for anything.

Magnacut – 300x – a relatively undamaged section viewing at high magnification in search of carbides. If you look very closely, you can see a few tiny whitish dots. those are carbides. I may plane an edge of clean wood later with this and 80crv2 with the cap set close to see if we can get a better pattern. The damage at the edge here isn’t fabulous, but it doesn’t really threaten much or leave topographical lines on work. Keep in mind, this picture is a hair under 1 hundredth of an inch of edge length.

Second, the 80crv2 Pictures

80crv2 – 150x – typical edge length. There is only one spot of damage on the entire length, so there’s no need to show several sections of undamaged length. See the next picture for the only damage that occurred.

80crv2 – 150x – the only observed damage at the edge. This should be removed or close to it in a typical honing section, but this iron has more edge life left and some of it would be worn off of the iron’s length if no more occurs.

80crv2 – 300x – close look for the carbides. Hard to find here but you can find small light colored dots here and there. the diagonal lines may be careless sharpening on my part, or they could just be oil that didn’t get fully wiped off. Simple steels are somewhat tolerant to

The take-away from this is that at the very least, I will grind off the bevel of the Magnacut iron and reestablish an edge that comes from steel further into the iron. That may help.

If it doesn’t, then the solution to get the edge to last is to start adding buffing or additional total angle. Where that would start to help is something I’m not sure of. At 33 degrees or so in this case, it’s about as steep as I’d want to go for a target for daily use and increasing the initial edge angle shortens potential edge life, regardless of the side of the bevel it’s on. It may improve actual edge life, but I’m not going to set up a bunch of “not actual work” tests to try to figure all of this out. I have the need for some cases made of cherry in the next couple of months and if I don’t get to them sooner than that, I will get an idea of the reground edge in that work then.

It should be uncommon to find high-cost tools with overheated initial bevels, but one never knows.

On the second little sub-topic of whether or not 80crv2 is better or as good as O-1 for my own personal use, in knives, it definitely is (takes twice as much energy to break at 62 hardness). I’m not sure in planes, but would also say that what little damage shows up here is inconsequential.

Magnacut – First Practical Test

This will be a long post, so I will post in less conversational and more kind of fractious text to try to make up for it. In 2019, I tested a large number of plane irons that were purchased, borrowed, and in one case, made by me. The tests involved smoothing wood only on edges to keep the cuts even and fair, and the process was very controlled. In the end, highly alloyed irons (CPM M4 and PM V11) separated themselves from the group, and I declared V11 more or less superior in the tests. Against CPM M4, it is the case that you can actually by V11 (probably carpenter XHP) in a commercial iron for a reasonable price. Everything about V11 in the test was wonderful except that it didn’t grind/hone quite as nice as plain steels. But it returned edge life to make up for it.

This seemed a little odd, but tests are tests and I recorded everything. It seemed odd, because years before, I tested a Custom 5 1/2 from Veritas – with V11 – against my own beech try plane sizing plane bodies from rough. The aspects of the beech plane other than the iron made it better for the work and I could do more actual planing volume before resharpening.

I was so pleased with the smoothing test, though, that I used the V11 iron and made a bunch of XHP irons for jointer, panel plane type work and smoothing. In work where the wood wasn’t already flat, like jointing rough wood edges, V11/XHP fell flat, nicked more easily and took longer to hone or grind. What worked well in the test didn’t turn out to work well in real life woodworking. Unless you are only smoothing wood, which I guess some people do, and then maybe it will work out for you. Continuous cuts in wood are the minority for me.

Lesson learned. I made knives with the rest of the sheet of XHP that I’d purchased and sold the V11 irons in the middle of all of this, anyway.

That’s important as background for why this test is just real work and not a controlled setup where you can measure everything and ensure everything is fair.

The Wood and Planes

Wood: Rough cherry sized for loft bed ladder sides. Same board ripped in half. The two subject planes and irons each clean up and flatten one half. No other planes.

Irons: Magnacut and a house O1 tapered iron hardened and tempered to about 61/62.

Planes: For Magnacut, a very clean and flattened T20 Stanley #6. For the O1 iron, a heavy cocobolo coffin smoother that I made years ago, larger than a typical coffin smoother, and heavier. 2 1/4″ wide. The plane isn’t new, but the iron is new. One I made this year and have used little.

Cap iron set: about 2 hundredths from the edge. Not a fine smooth set, but more like a try plane set.

Bevel conditions: Magnacut – factory bevel ground a little shallower than as arrived after initial planing, so second bevel. The O1 iron is also likely first bevel, possibly second.

Sharpening: freehand second steeper bevel set by india stone and then finished on an oilstone with diamond powder followed by 1 micron diamonds and a strop. This isn’t needed with O1, but diamond finish is a good idea with anything that has vanadium greater than trivial amounts. No physical difference in sharpening method or observed edge.

Planing: same shaving thickness for both planes based on observation.

Acquisition of the irons: purchased the Magnacut. Made the O1 iron.

(I think it’s important to note that the iron was purchased at random, I did no contact the seller and have on bias about how it will perform either way other than the hope that it would offer a “V11-ish-but-less-nicking” type experience based on micrograph pictures and toughness data )

Pictures – Backs of Irons after Planing

Pictures at 150x have a height of .019″. 300x pictures, half that.

First, the Magnacut iron pictures. See the descriptions under each.

Magnacut - 1 micron freshly sharpened edge. Focus on edge uniformity and less on the wide polished flat area.

Magnacut – 150x – 1 micron diamond edge finish. Focus on the edge when looking at pictures and not the abraded flat area. This is an edge about 2 to 3 times finer than an 8k waterstone.

Magnacut – 150x – undamaged length of edge after planing. Note, the edge has become a little bit more round with wear and probably some shortening of the iron length.

Magnacut – 150x – typical smaller denting along much of the edge.

Magnacut 150x – largest deflection damage

Magnacut 300x – typical edge areas with small deflections but also looking for carbide size. No large carbides visible, but wear may not have been enough to expose them. Smoothing with a close cap iron makes it easier to find carbides. No seeing any at all does help confirm that the production steel is fine like the micrographs of earlier batches show. The smudgy smooth look is wear.

All in all, it planed pleasantly, but the nicking did leave lines on the work. The large nick shown left a relatively wide very visible nick. It was at the corner of the iron, or within about 3/8ths of the corner.

Total time planing was less than 10 minutes with both planes used here. The damage is a surprise, along with relatively common back and forth between smooth edge sections and areas of small nicking. If the O1 pictures show much better, a more careful test will be needed with two irons in the same plane honed using a guide and an angle setter to ensure fairness.

The damage that’s shown is the type that leads to an iron feeling dull and refusing to cut as easily before much wear has occurred. The same as I observed jointing edges with V11 and using a jointer on jack-planed board faces. Without a direct test, I couldn’t say which of the two (V11 vs. Magnacut) performs better.

Second – O1 Iron Pictures

I did not take as many O1 pictures as I wasn’t yet sure I’d post anything of this test without confirming the results in a follow-up test. There was also no edge damage anywhere on the O1 iron, which lessens the need to show “typical” and “worst” damage on the edge.

The second reason this wasn’t a pre-meditated test, but more like middle of the process idea, is that coffin smoothers – even heavy ones – will beat up your elbows if you try to do too much non-smoothing work with them. My elbows were already well-used for the day, and they were feeling the punches from the coffin smoother. Moving to the 6 (normally would be wooden try plane) was a way to lessen the pounding.

At any rate, here are the two pictures:

O-1 Plane Iron – 150x – Typical Edge Wear. Note there is no damage anywhere on the edge, but you can see that the wear is greater in the same task. The O-1 iron did a little bit more planing due to some twist on its side of the board, but not enough to explain the greater wear by itself.

O-1 Plane Iron – 300x – Searching for carbides again. The light colored dots that you can barely see are probably carbides. Confirmation again that it’s easier to find them when wearing a pronounced shoot groove on the back of the iron when the cap iron is set closer to the edge. Note the wear smudge, but edge uniformity remains excellent.

Again, no damage pictures to show, so the story for O-1 is short.

The surprising results call for: 1) Picking an iron to test against Magnacut in the same plane, 2) using a honing guide to make sure the results are as fair as possible.

These pictures show what I believe was happening when V11 suddenly didn’t perform as well on my bench, too, unexpectedly showing nicks and leaving lines on work and ultimately being more trouble to use than O1. Steels like O-1 and 80crv2 don’t have much wear resistance, but the difference in honing off 3-4 thousandths of Magnacut vs. just doing a routine edge freshen for O-1 is significant. When removing the damage above in subsequent honing with a guide, a brisk session on a 400 grit diamond stone and extra attention on the 1000 side still needed a second go to completely remove everything. Failing to complete that just means you’re starting with an already damaged edge.

Failing to remove uniform wear down to the very last bit without edge damage still results in a finished surface coming off of the plane.

So much for the short text idea.

Planes and Chisels – Is There a Need for Super Steels?

This article is really about the first two new plane iron steel options I’ve seen in a while, viewed both in the context of older plane irons as well as vs. Lee Valley’s V11, which was long ago outed on Sawmill Creek. XHP and V11 are used interchangeably here. The two new options are CPM 10V (sounds like V11, but much different composition) and CPM Magnacut. The former, like XHP, isn’t a new steel. The latter is. But to my knowledge, 10V hasn’t been offered as a production plane iron in the US previously. Now, on to the story….

Somewhere in the early 2010s, Lee Valley introduced their V11 plane irons. Based on XRF (analysis) of the composition of those irons, they are either CTS-XHP or something very close. XRF analysis still doesn’t provide carbon content, but the rest of the alloying was on the mark.

What is XHP? It’s a high-carbide-content and relatively high carbon powder metal steel that’s almost stainless. The carbides are generally carbon and chromium, without what is now more typical in popular steels – harder smaller carbides like vanadium and niobium.

What XHP has is wear resistance. In spades. You can experience this by planing an edge with one of these irons and then planing an edge with O1 or A2 or whatever else you’d like, carefully preparing each iron the same way. You’ll find that V11 will plane about twice as far as a good O1 iron.

What I’ve found since doing the same thing is that there’s not much regular work where I can get that interval to hold up, but it should last longer. It will take about twice as long to grind and twice the effort to remove a similar amount of metal on a sharpening stone, too, but the abrasion resistance is double so the fact that it won’t hone as fast *when you’re abrading it* shouldn’t be a surprise.

V11 Came and Went and Little Else Followed

The rumor being passed around when V11 arrived was that “Lee Valley developed a new steel”. This is extremely unlikely given what they mentioned their costs were. It seems more likely that they tried various steels that already exist, and based on how they typically operate – sending tools to users for feedback before full production – probably solicited feedback.

It’s my opinion so far that if you really feel the need to dip your toes in something that wears longer than older steel, the inexpensive Chinese high speed steel irons and V11 are the only reasonable irons that return what they say they will. It’s possible that there is a powder D2 iron out there somewhere that could also be included in that, but if you buy a conventional D2 steel iron, you’ll find that it has large carbides that are poorly distributed and they will be big enough to fail even in sharpening and then the iron will be notchy or gritty and leave lines on work.

Before these irons, Academy Saw Works made M2 irons that were good ,and Stanley Hobart did, too. The former were too expensive for them to make economic sense woodworking if that’s important, and the latter probably are only easy to find in Australia and maybe no longer easy. None of these were ever widely sold, though. There were also other small batches made in the US with CPM steels – 3V and M4 at least.

In my opinion, Lee Valley was concerned that someone may make an iron with the same steel if they had just called the alloy what it is. I don’t think this is likely, but at the time, who knows. Why wouldn’t it be likely? XHP isn’t really widely available and when it is, it’s very expensive. The option when steel isn’t available is to order a melt of your own, but the average small maker isn’t going to do this either. I don’t know what Lee Valley does, but I would imagine that they do enough volume to order or trigger a melt being done for their order. The rest of us, you can get CTS-XHP at retail from a retailer that specializes in carpenter products (I don’t recall the name, but if you search for XHP bar stock, you’ll find it – I only remember the background is red at the site), but you’ll find the bar stock itself will be $25 or so per iron that you make. This is *a lot* of money compared to other conventional steels.

So, the fanfare came and went, and the market got little more educated, it seems. One of LVs fans suggested at one point that I should “leave the steel to the experts”, which I thought was humorous. A few more educated individuals called out the idea that the composition of a steel being secret was nonsense in a world where it’s touted in knives, and XRF tests are often done publicly to line out retailers who sell things that are too good to be true.

I was pleased enough with a test planing clean wood that I made myself a set of XHP irons, tested one against V11 and found it was comparable. And then, I started back to regular woodworking and found that once the wood wasn’t already clean wood, I couldn’t get the same interval, and the chipping and other things that can occur in regular work took longer to hone, and I eventually just went back to plain steels. I also sold off the three V11 irons that I’d gotten in the past – no bueno for me. For a beginner who has a prescription honing method and will never progress, maybe that’s different. I still have my XHP irons, but they’re not in any other planes.

From time to time, I’d see custom made irons sold on ebay but consider the cost mentioned above, then the cost to get a small batch heat treated and ground and what will you find? irons for about $100. We’re not the knife community, and LV charges about $10 more for V11. They’re not lining their pockets – in my opinion, they have been the only reasonable option if you’re not going to learn to sharpen faster and find out why plain steel irons are all that really ever sold in volume. And most woodworkers are going to imagine woodworking more than they do it, so this is probably most of the market.

So, from my point of view, that’s where we are. Lie Nielsen is still using A2, which I would assume is for their convenience because it moves little in heat treatment. They may tell you otherwise, and so too may other retailers. A2 does cost a little more in bar stock form than O1, but we have become so lacking in skill as a society that heat treatment services are cutting back what they will heat treat with several posting notice that they will no longer heat treat O1 steel. Lie Nielsen did mention that their heat treatment service or perhaps a separate service informed them, too, no more O1.

So, What’s the Point?

Two things – First, I’ve found over time that the steel in the iron doesn’t matter that much if it’s not defective. Your ability to use a plane properly will dictate how much you get done, and on the chisel side of things, V11 isn’t that great in my opinion. What it has is hardness, which often allows beginners to get an easier sharp edge, and hardness does help a chisel in a side by side test. However, when I did a chisel test making an article about the Unicorn method, i didn’t find V11 to perform better or as well as some other lower cost options. This isn’t a surprise – abrasion resistance is a cutting or planing boon, but not so much for chisels. If you imagine yourself paring a chisel until the edge is round, it’ll never happen.

Second, over time, I’ve realized that most of the people who talk a lot about hand tools use them relatively little. They become indignant if you suggest that, but it is certainly the case that if you don’t do much work rough to finish with hand tools, you’ll have an unreliable opinion about what hand tools are actually capable of. I would refer to this as some woodworking, but a lot more imagining woodworking. Imagining woodworking leads to things like focusing on backlash, scanning tool reviews in fine woodworking and buying what’s recommended. Woodworking is finding something acceptable and learning to use it well, focusing on learning incremental little bits that make “well” better and better.

An example of woodworking vs. imagining it and what the result is is using a plane with a cap iron. Few people do it, but it’s at the core of getting a volume of wood planed between sharpenings. A common stanley iron used with a cap iron will do several multiples of the volume of work that a V11 iron will do without using the cap iron. Something I also found when I believed the converse early on – even a wooden plane with an iron that wears less long than O1 will outwork a metal plane *with the cap iron set*. That doesn’t seem like it should be, but it is the case.

Another example would be use of chisels – a good worker can use any decent chisel and figure out how to set up the chisel so that the edge doesn’t fail. This is rarely discussed online. I’d call this the magic of experience. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s causing the improvement, but it occurs just with experience. Sometimes the changes are conscious.

Long story short, if there is a mention about how revolutionary harder or more abrasion resistant irons are, I generally assume that the person making the statement hasn’t done much hand work, or if they have, it’s been a narrow bit of work done after shoveling wood through power tools, with significant sanding always being the final go after the plane finishes. If that wasn’t the case, we’d see a lot more posts asking how to stop iron nicking.

So, is there really any need for someone to work their way through lists of steels that aren’t designed for woodworking and see if any are “better”. I think V11 offers a fair bargain in some cases (effort to grind and sharpen is in proportion to more plain steels as long as work doesn’t nick the edge). Higher hardness PM D2 would do the same, at least as well. So would high quality M2, which could be done inexpensively and just isn’t. I think the answer is no – but someone could, anyway, for curiosity and also because while few will admit they’re just practicing escapism with hand tools, most are.

And just recently, I noticed there are now at least two available small batch options – CPM Magnacut and CPM 10V

Magnacut is a small particle / small carbide stainless, and 10V is a higher carbide volume steel that’s “kind of” similar to V11 except that the carbide volume is mostly vanadium carbides and not chromium. Magnacut is vanadium and niobium.

What does that mean? Both of the steels above have smaller harder carbides than V11. One technically wears longer (10V) and one doesn’t (magnacut).

Magnacut can achieve about the same hardness as V11, is far more stainless, and is tougher with finer particles. Going deep into the properties probably isn’t worthwhile here, but it would appear that Magnacut will have an edge life about 90% of V11/XHP in abrasion tests – only time will tell if it handles rougher work better than V11.

10V can technically reach edge life intervals of 40-45% longer than V11. This is bonkers long. It is also going to be tolerant to heavy handed grinding as the tempering range is above 1000F. You can brown or blue the edge of it.

This isn’t true for V11 and Magnacut, which will both hone and grind with more heat than more plain steels, but they won’t tolerate more heat.

The Magnacut irons are made by Lake Erie Toolworks, and the 10V irons appear to be a test run by a toolmaker in Chicago. As of this writing, the former are about $90 with tax and shipping, a little more for wider irons, and the 10V irons are $50 – but only available in 2″ size.

I have bought one of each (not given, not offered to test, nothing like that – I just bought them full price. Anyone reviewing tools to make a video or get free stuff – no bueno). I think either has potential merits, just like V11. based on some initial planing and sharpening with each, I don’t think they’ll be great for rough to finish work, but people like me aren’t the market for these irons, so I’ll address how well they work from the context of someone who would also buy V11 and feel like it makes a big difference.

Where to get Information on the steels

Larrin Thomas has the most accurate “usable” information I’ve seen anywhere. Larrin isn’t a woodworker, and I haven’t convinced any knife makers or other folks that maybe there’s something different about edge properties in woodworking tools, but the information on the site is generalized, so it won’t matter.

It’s semi-technical. That’s what you need if you want to actually learn anything. If you want a one paragraph narrative that uses word like “super fine grain” or “really tough”, without explaining those things, you can read woodworkers or watch youtube channels who really are only there to sell you things.

For information about XHP, 10V and Magnacut, see the following:

Knife Steel Nerds on XHP

Knife Steel Nerds on Magnacut

Knife Steel Nerds on 10V

Lastly – 10V is not new, and it’s widely used for dies and other industrial purposes where high wear is needed. Magnacut is new – it’s something Larrin developed and if you want to read further, you’ll find that it’s more or less a Stainless version of CPM 4V – that’s loosely put. 4V would probably be a good option for woodworking, but while magnacut and 10V bar stock is expensive, 4V is hardly any less expensive itself.

XHP has been around for a long time. You can ignore Larrin’s distaste for its carbide size – knife steel fanatics are obsessed with toughness, but there are other properties that are ahead of it to a reasonable point for woodworking. We don’t put tools in tree stumps and then see how much energy it takes to bend them over and break them.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about XHP/V11 being “almost stainless”, for woodworking purposes, it’s stainless. Even for reasonable kitchen use, it would be – I’ve made knives out of it, too, and while it can take very light staining in regular use from certain foods, I’ve left it unwashed in a drawer to find no rust later.

1095 Steel – Finally – Good to Master, but No Ultimate Use

1095 is a steel that most people think of when they mention modern handsaws or card scrapers. Or perhaps older knives and some current kabar knives. Except none of those knives are actually 1095. They’re a modified alloy with chromium and vanadium.

But, you can’t really get that publicly.

I had a relatively lengthy post – OK..all of them are – about solving 1084. Solving 1084 had to do with just how fast grain grows in 1084 if it’s overheated a little. Other steels seem to like a fast overheat just before quench, and 1095 is one that doesn’t suffer too much. but….

What’s wrong with 1095?

You’ll probably never see 1095 in commercial tools other than spring steel. It’s really cheap, and it tends to have some of the manganese (hardenability) replaced by chromium, presumably because just adding carbon to 1084 results in a really brittle steel.

Chromium takes up some of the slack for missing manganese in terms of hardenability, and 1095 is what you would call a high hardness steel with poor hardenability. The former refers to hardness potential. The latter refers to have fast steel has to cool to get there. 1095 needs a fast quench. Parks 50 is the only thing I’ve found that gets it right. You can screw around with water/brine and intermittent quenching or whatever else, but Parks 50 and a very thorough quench will probably harden better than anything you can do with water that doesn’t end in cracking.

I have since found “solving” 1095 that it’s tolerant of a little temperature overshot, which probably has to do with having chromium in the alloy. But less tolerant than 26c3. So if you’re going to quench it, heat it past nonmagnetic a little but not too much and not for too long, then quench it as fast as you can and get it to the lowest temperature you can at the end of the quench as fast as possible. For me, this is parks 50 for a couple of seconds and then immediately to cold water after the high heat has been removed, and then into the freezer. This sounds stupid, but I leave a band of frost on the freezer and within about 30 seconds from hot like to stick a plane iron or chisel to the frost in the freezer and then I leave it in the freezer while the tempering toaster oven and the “metal sandwich” that stabilizes temperatures heats.

But….that’s not what’s wrong with it. What’s wrong is two things: 1) there’s nothing really in 1095 that will prevent a soak from getting and leaving a lot of carbon in solution – far more than the eutectic limit. 2) I don’t think the quality of 1095 that’s available now is that great, but some is good. And I’ve been warned by several people that the quality is iffy.

All three sources that I’ve used for bar stock have been different. It’s nice to find someone who lists the alloy, and then purchase whichever source has the highest chromium level. And hope that it’s quality – if it’s not, move on.

What about #1, though? if steel has too much carbon in the lattice, and not in iron or other carbides, the form of martensite is different and it can be filled with small cracks. If you get 1095 just right, it’ll be about as tough as O1. if you don’t, it might be half as tough, and in my experience, that’s enough of a problem to have a chippy plane iron.

I still like it better than 1084 when it’s done right as far as plane irons go. Why? it feels sharper. I can’t think of a real reason to use either 1095 or 1084 for plane irons at this point, though. 80Crv2 makes a better plane iron than 1084 and 1095. But it’s nice to experiment, and if you can really nail 1084 and make it work at high hardness, and the same with 1095, it will improve your accuracy and make heat treatment of other steels better.

Three Tries – Three Different Steels

First, I sent samples to Larrin Thomas without thinking much. I just applied the same heat treatment routine that I would use for O1 and 26c3. I think this causes a little bit of grain growth. Keeping the thermal cycles tighter (right at the point nonmagnetic starts to occur and then let the steel cool) will keep the grain from growing and keeping the temperature overshot lower will keep grain small but beyond just the looks, the result is slightly less hard. My 400F samples were 63.1 hardness and something like 4.3 ft lbs toughness. You’d expect something more like 61/62 and 8-10. Had i tempered them further, I have no clue – maybe they’d have been OK.

After solving 1084, I did the same with 1095, snapping samples and both observing grain size and seeing how easily they broke untempered. Steel should break easily when hit with a hammer untempered, but there are alloys that retain austenite at a high % that would prove that wrong. None of the plan steels that I’ve tried will resist breaking though. Breaking tempered steel would be more accurate in terms of actual usable toughness, but high toughness steels can become really hard to break so I don’t do it – the grain is the focus.

The first 1095 that I bought was from New Jersey Steel Baron. Since I didn’t have Parks 50 at the time, I was kind of unimpressed by it. It was also very cheap, so I didn’t care that much and put it aside. fast forward to now and I like the version that New Jersey Steel Baron sells. I try to avoid anything that would resemble a soak to maximize the amount of carbon in carbides. I do this with a pre-quench and then a sort-of anneal in vermiculte, and then do as much as possible to not go past nonmagnetic for thermal cycles before quenching.

Still, the result isn’t exactly a cornucopia of carbides and I haven’t found the free lunch. But the early samples that I made showed almost no carbide and I’ve gotten to this point. The iron may be a point softer, but the edge holds up. And the straightness of the edge is wonderful. This uniformity seems to be important along with an edge that doesn’t look very rounded right at the tip (AEB-L, for example, wears longer, but the edge shows a more rounded profile – I don’t know why this is).

NJSB 1095 tempered at 375F – a very sweet plane iron.

The second 1095 that I bought was from Alpha Knife Supply, which is where I get 26c3 (love it for chisels, obviously). The listing doesn’t reveal the mill but mentions that if you want great quality, finding bohler or ordering a melt from bohler is safe – or something to that effect. So, it’s probably not bohler, or the listing would say. This 1095 seems to have some oddness in it – not terminal by any means, but the shiny spots in it look like something that wasn’t fully dissolved, and I didn’t normalize the steel or do anything unusual, it’s just bar stock, so I think this is how it arrived. This bright spot wears just a little slower and leaves a stripe on wood that can be seen but not felt.

Alpha Knife Steel 1095 – nice fine carbides, but what is the bright area? It’s about 4 thousandths long. Is it undissolved Chromium? Notice that the edge isn’t as neat – reminds me of 52100, and then it’s very neat on either side. The effect on wood (there are more spots like this in the edge) is little stripes that aren’t as bright looking.

The AKS sample here is actually the first one I got right, and I puzzled about the stripes in use until getting the blade under the microscope. If the iron isn’t very good, there will be defects, anyway, so you don’t know right away if you did something wrong or if it’s the steel. It’s *rarely* something in the steel.

In an effort to find 1095 with more chromium, or more like an an observation while browsing for other steels, I found that USA knife maker had a listing with chromium near the upper end of the spec range and also had added nickel. The results of that are also good, just as the NJSB version. There’s no guarantee that some of the vendors aren’t selling wholesale to each other or selling from the same wholesale source, so the first and third pictures could be the same stuff just from different sellers.

I don’t see much there, but will take another shot at wearing one of these irons. it seems the key to getting a really robust view of the carbides has to do with setting the cap iron closer and wearing more deeply in to the back of the iron.

nonetheless, this iron seems to work well.

I haven’t done any roughing of wood lately so I don’t know if toughness will be an issue. These irons subjectively wear a little less long than 80CrV2 or O1, but not too much less. the edge quality is nice and they feel more crisp than 1084.

But I also can’t think of a practical advantage to continue to make or use them. It’s just nice to get them right.

1095, like 1084, is cheap. if it costs more than $7 of bar stock to make an iron, I’d be surprised.

I sure would love to get a hold of the Sharon 50-100B (I only have the version without vanadium) or Carbon V or whatever Kabar is currently using to make knives. I get the sense that the extra chromium and the vanadium do the same favors they do in 80CrV2 and the toughness would be greatly improved enough to maybe be worth using that steel in chisels as well as plane irons.

AEB-L Stainless – Not What I Expected

I heat treat in a propane forge. That generally means I can’t do what’s important for stainless steels, which is a high temperature soak. I can do the other part of the need for chromium stainless steels, which is get a small area of steel really hot. But along with breaking the rules, this is usually highly controlled for temperature and duration, and temperatures that you really can’t get away with in the open atmosphere.

Instead of doing that, I preheat steel quickly to above critical, let it cool just back to where critical would be and then ramp up temperature by eye to as hot as I can as quickly as I can and quench. I’m aiming for almost yellow and not much exposure time to open air and then quench and get to cold as fast as possible. Stainless and high chromium steels often will cool with plates just fine, but I’m just tinfoil hatting that I will come up a little short and I want the quench to be fast.

Is this a long term plan? No. If a stainless shows potential, then at some point, I will either get a furnace or I will send a batch off and give half of them away at cost. But I’m not there yet.

V11 is Somewhat Stainless

A few years ago, two posters on woodworking forums talked about an XRF of V11 showing that it is CTS-XHP. I don’t know if it is exactly, but the composition matched CTS-XHP spec. XHP is a relatively high carbon steel with enough chromium to be referred to as stainless – very high if you’re used to numbers like 0.8 or 1%. I don’t know enough about steel chemistry except to speculate that a lot of the chromium gets tied up with carbon when the carbon content is high and stainlessness won’t just be discernible by percent of chromium because chromium has to remain in the lattice and it even has to remain in the right place in the grains in the lattice. Put differently, a very very low carbon steel may be very stainless with 13% chromium, but XHP is only borderline stainless if you’re really going to neglect a knife.

Why did I bring up V11? I learned that the high temperature soak for stainless steels that frees elements to go back into the steel’s lattice/solution before quenching isn’t just important for dissolving chromium carbides. If you reason that you don’t need to do that and you can just heat it and quench it at a lower temperature, it will lack hardness. As in, you can’t just reason that you’ll work with what’s already in solution quickly and get hardness – it comes up short.

That comes to play here. I’d suspect that if you’re willing to make XHP really hot really quickly and quench it and then run it to the freezer very quickly after finishing the tail end of the quench in water, you can get 60+ hardness after temper. That is, you can get close to the furnace schedule. In doing this, you’re relying on the bars from Carpenter Steel being good quality to start. It seems to be fine.

Here’s another why – XHP has a lot of carbides in it, and it’s a little lacking in toughness in chisels. There’s a little something else going on that I don’t know – it could be volume of carbides (cracks start in carbides) or it could be lack of the same directional property that some other steels have. the following link shows a micrograph of XHP, the white “balls” are carbides, you can read the entire page which is half history lesson at knife steel nerds.

https://i0.wp.com/knifesteelnerds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1000X-XHP.jpg?w=750&ssl=1

AEB-L, however, is a completely different animal.

What is it?

First start with the micrograph (you can click this)

Notice how fine it is? It’s much lower in carbon. XHP is about 1.6% carbon and AEB-L is about 0.67% carbon. A drastic difference. I’ve quick heated it in the past without knowing just how important the high temperature is and it makes a kind of soft iron that needs to have the edge buffed to not fold. Then it planes a long time, but that’s no good.

AEB-L is also cheap – it’s a steel used to make razor blades. Knife steel nerds also has a nice write up on where it’s used. Just follow the link above and search for AEB-L.

An interesting side fact here is the idea that PM steels are the finest grain-wise ignores reality. PM allows steel compositions that would be too coarse if it cooled from a large ingot, but it doesn’t negate the fact that there are other compositions that are very fine without needing a powder process. This results in AEB-L being finer than any powder metal stainless that I’ve seen.

What’s the Draw of Fine Grain?

Somewhere this seemed to imply “it’ll be like carbon steel but stainless”. That’s kind of true, maybe? If you read about AEB-L, it can be done in furnace and finished with a cryo dip after the quench to get very high hardness and still have good toughness. 64, in fact. it should hold up at high hardness better than XHP/V11, be finer grained, and I surmised maybe a little easier to sharpen.

So, yesterday I gave heat treatment another try concentrating heat just on the last inch of the plane iron, quick quench, finish in the freezer. I don’t know what the hardness is, but it must be close to 60 as it shows no ills. It also appears from pictures following that there’s no evidence of suffering anything from not being soaked – for woodworking purposes at least. it would be interesting to see what it’s like at high hardness, but I don’t have the means to get the steel any harder.

Suddenly vs. prior samples, this sample has strong hardness and it’s not quick to hone. Prior versions of this had planing test edge life of 1.6 or 1.65 times more than O1 steel. I’d need to use this iron planing for about 2500 feet in edges just to test that once, and I don’t really have the desire right now.

The reality is that wear resistance makes it slower to sharpen and it is. It also makes it grind kind of hot, which isn’t what we want. It’s not a high temperature tolerant steel and the temper is 350F in the sample here. Grinding it to an accidental brown edge will have undesired effect.

This is part of the conundrum with steels like XHP and now confirmed with AEB-L, too. When you grind these steels, which you’ll be doing a fair amount if you use tools much, the steel wears more slowly and it grinds less cool. XHP takes about twice as long to grind even without considering that and AEB-L speculatively took me twice as long to establish a bevel on a belt grinder. Just estimating based on wear life in wood, AEB-L would grind only about 60% as fast, but that’s compounded further by having to stop more to dip.

Overall, finally getting a hard sample and that’s a little bit of a road block to day to day use (it’s annoying). But it’s worth having a look at how it wears.

This image is the wear after 540 feet. It wears slowly and the wear area looks so odd because of the lack of any visible carbides even at 300x optical . I usually get wear pictures on carbon steels to see carbides at only about 200 feet of planing on cherry. If this iron felt like carbon steel in wood – like in a free lunch way – longer wearing, feels the same – I’d consider planing a volume of wood.

But, it doesn’t. I don’t know why for sure, but I’m starting to get the sense that some carbide volume right at the edge makes for an edge that wears more thinly somehow.

So, this iron would last a long time, but it doesn’t have the feel that carbon steel does, and strangely, XHP/V11 with its high carbide volume has a really keen and sharp feel. Its achilles is that in less than perfect wood, it takes nicks like anything else, or maybe even a little easier, and grinding and honing them out is twice the work.

So, I think I’m back to using plain steels. Too bad. if I ever get a furnace and a dewar of liquid nitrogen, I’ll consider trying to make a very high hardness sample and see if the edge is different.

So…..razor blades? I don’t think AEB-L is ever used in a plain razor blade. I think it’s used as the steel stamping, then it’s honed, and then the edge is coated with something hard. You can see ads claiming razors are platinum coated or whatever – I have no idea what they are actually coated with, but I have honed the coating off of them before when they are dead to see if they can be resharpened, and what’s left is just steel that’s too soft to work at an acute edge.

Steels that d0 well in straight razors rather do have a relatively large volume of carbides compared to AEB-L, but they’re iron carbides and not chromium carbides.

Free lunch yet again not found.

But I have confirmed previously that this steel, which is slower to sharpen but not difficult like steels with a lot of vanadium, will wear much longer than A2 steel and it’s creeping up on XHP – and it’s cheap. About $10 per plane iron in steel costs.

I have no idea if the qualities of picking up shavings more easily during a wear cycle are important to the average user. They should be for anyone who may be sometimes planing several hundred board feet from rough each year as how easily the shaving is picked up is far more important in terms of effort than how many feet are planed carefully in a test. This same factor is why I don’t care for 52100 – it will technically wear longer, but it requires more effort from the person using the plane to keep it in the cut as it dulls and that just isn’t very practical.

For Reference

Here’s how much wear I encountered in the O1 test on the same board after 540 feet. You can see that a great deal of wear has occurred rounding a larger section of the edge and forcing me to increase the light level significantly.

80CrV2 Steel – Way Better than Expected, and Probably Better than O1

Half the price of O1 and at least as good in plane irons. I put off even considering this alloy for chisels because the data sheet shows it being around 60 hardness at a 400F temper. I find favor with most 1% and higher steels around 400F, but admit that I don’t have a great reason to believe that it’s the best temperature for everything.

The other thing against 80CrV2 is that it’s a not an expensive steel but it’s not as cheap as it could be with some retailers, and the prices is around what you’d expect for O1. While making an order a couple of weeks ago, I found that NJ Steel Baron doesn’t charge too much more than the very lowest cost HC steels like 1084 and 1095.

So, what is it? I’ve never heard of it as a woodworker, but saw someone else attribute a statement to Larrin Thomas that it is used in woodworking tools. If you’re purchasing LN, LV or other boutique tools, it’s probably not going to be there. Maybe it’s used in carving tools and plane irons in europe, or maybe it’s used in what are lower class chisels for woodworking, but the top of the range hardware store chisels in the $15-$20 each. I really don’t know.

From 1084 and 1095, the Troubles

1084 and 1095 gave me trouble until I snapped samples to see what color and time they will show before grain growth is a problem. 1095 isn’t too bad, but 1084 is a different story. Shoot a little too high before the quench and grain growth doubles. Do that while thermal cycling and the point of cycling gets lost, plus the quench. You have to be attendant with it, and give it only a few seconds if chasing the quench temperature up and not nearly as high as something like 26c3 will tolerate. Put differently, the routine that I used to better any published results for 26c3 results in *very* poor 1084.

I’d hoped to find 1095-ish with chromium and vanadium. The former to add some toughness without sacrificing hardenability, and the latter to pin grain size, allow for the overshot that I like to ensure hardness. It’s not to be, and 52100 just isn’t very good for woodworking.

1084 also will not ever wear as long as O1, but it does OK. that isn’t a problem with chisels, and the toughness of 1084 was good enough once I solved not growing grain that it will make a fine plane iron tempered a little lower. Translation – it can be as hard as O1 and 1095 will tolerate planing.

Seeing the better than expected corrected version of 1084, I made a couple of plane irons out of 80crV2 and used an offcut that was waste off of the same sheet and snapped samples. The grain is as fine as anything I’ve ever seen that attains high hardness, and the hardness was a little better than I expected starting with a 375F double temper. I suspect it’s around 61/62, about the same as O1 tempered at 400F.

I’m going to avoid going into a broad discussion about how much carbon is in solution (not in carbides) in each of the steels, but for brevity, some steels suffer from too much of it remaining in the lattice and not in carbides. The resulting toughness vs. pictures of the snapped grain or micrographs can seemingly be 1/3 of expected. This isn’t always bad – o1 is far less tough than 52100, but it’s nicer to use.

What is it?

Despite the dreaded “chrome vanadium” name, it is not some soft shiny steel that makes a terrible chisel. That label given to the variety is ill attributed because someone knew the combination of favorable properties – limiting grain growth and toughness, but paired them with a low carbon amount – often 0.5 or 0.6% carbon. This isn’t really much good for woodworking, and the 0.6% variety is listed a lot in not-quite-hard-enough-chisels from China. When I reharden them, they are only a little better – there’s just not much potential.

80CrV2 is 0.8 or 0.85% carbon, manganese of about 0.4% (just over half of 1084), Chromium taking place of some of the manganese (0.5%) and a small amount of vanadium (0.2%). It’s a water hardening steel, so we’re not likely to see any of the boutique US makers making it. The chromium and vanadium are enough to make it more friendly to heat treat than the plainest of steels, but they won’t make it feel gummy or slick like A2, etc.

In woodworking, you will often see O1 labeled as plain carbon steel, but if you work with older tools or 1095 or 26c3 or whatever else of that sort, you’ll notice the feel of the alloying in O1. it’s not bad, but you can feel it. it’s more obvious in 52100 due to the chromium content (1.5%), and, of course, once you get used to plain steels, A2 feels terrible. V11 also gets its slickness for a huge dose of chromium.

I can’t well compare grain size from snapped samples with 80CrV2 to anything else I have because I had to double the magnification on my hand scope to 100x optical to see any difference in samples just heated from bar and quenched, then thermal cycled and then the same as the latter but with an intentional simulated careless overheat.

Here’s the snapped sample from the quick heat at 100x:

Next, the same magnification but with three thermal cycles.

that’s outstanding. Even looking at this under a loupe you can’t see much.

Here’s the kicker – doing the same thing as above but allowing the sample to overshoot in 15 seconds to a very bright orange resulted in….wait for it.

Nothing. This is not a long duration forge heat, so it’s not license to just disregard what temperature does to steel. This would be more like what a beginner may unintentionally do. It may look at first sight like the second picture shows larger grain than the third, but I think that the actual sample had a little more toughness breaking and if you look at the individual grains, you’ll find them similar in size – especially given the limitations of snapped samples being photographed with a microscope that I got for $12.

1084 steel is constantly recommended to beginners. I think they have no chance if they’re using a forge. This is what beginners should be starting with. But the forgiveness allows more advanced forge heat treaters to get otherworldly consistent results without being as taxing as 1084.

There is toughness in reserve with this steel, so it would probably hold up in a plane iron tempered hard (like 63/64). Hard tempered irons are OK, I guess, but I generally like something around a hardness that the washita likes – somewhere around 62. More hardness means slower sharpening and the sharpening effort seems to increase faster than any footage gained planing.

So, How Long Does it Wear?

About the same as O1 – which is nice, because 1095 and 1084 don’t last that long, and neither does an old Ward iron or an iron made of 26c3.

To test this, I planed a single board alternating with an O1 iron that I already have and one of the new 80Crv2 irons, and I took pictures of the carbides about 2/3rds of the way through. I want to see how long each planes, but discern difference in how the edges feel because there’s a fair chance I may start using this stuff in my own plane irons.

The bottom line is at similar hardness, the edge life was almost identical. On the cherry board with a chosen shaving thickness, I planed 783 feet with 80CrV2 and 778 with O1. When clearance runs out, it lets you know ahead of time, but when it tips over toward not allow the plane to pick up a shaving, it seems to happen all at once. the margin of error in this test is probably 25 feet of planing, so figure these are about the same. that’s all I need to know.

Pictures of the carbides – O1 first, and since there was a lot of heavy edge wear, I had to turn up the light on the microscope. What I’m looking for is a nice even edge, and even carbides.

In the 52100 post, I showed O1 with much less wear. This is Bohler O1 and I think the others was starrett. But the real difference is far more war, exposing more shadowing with carbides in the worn edge. That is, some part of them is pointed directly back at the lens wheras the edge is rounded and appears dark because it reflects light elsewhere. there are a few odd carbides here or there, but these are seemingly 2 or 3 microns. Maybe they’re tungsten.

Now, the 80CrV2:

These are extremely high magnification (300x optical – the height of the picture is less than 1/100th of an inch in reality), but look at the tiny evenly dispersed carbides. The slightly different shape in the wear – who knows, it could be just how the steel wears or slight differences in cap iron setting. nonetheless, anywhere you see anything that looks like it’s even 2 microns, it’s probably two carbides close together.

it felt just a little sweeter. The evenness of the edge probably shows why.

So, what are we looking at in costs? A sheet of steel that will make 6 stanley plane irons costs $32.50 as I type this. There’s enough left for half a dozen marking knives or several nice kitchen paring knives. After allocating shipping to this sheet, we’re in the ballpark of $6-$7 an iron. bumping up to Lie-Nielsen or Infill thickness irons and the cost goes up a little bit, but I’d consider making a few LN replacement irons as there is no alternative to dumpy A2 now. I don’t have LN planes any longer, but I do have spokeshaves, and the A2 blades for them are just a terrible choice.

What about Chisels?

26c3 is probably unbeatable – it sharpens easily, it attains really high hardness easily and the crispness of the edge is superb. It’s not nearly as widely available, either.

But I will probably make a few 80CrV2 chisels just to see what they feel like at 350F temper and then down from there (or up in temperature and down in hardness). I think 26c3 is easy to get right, but a beginner may not have much chance of doing that in a forge, and my test samples bettered published specs, so I would be hesitant to guess how good it is in a furnace. The knifesteelnerds suggested heat treatment doesn’t get results that I get, and I think that’s a shame, but the steel itself may also not have that much value to knife users who can be wooed with the promise of something better that isn’t functionally better.

And in all fairness, though I have not a single positive thing to say about Devin Thomas, Larrin is the one who in his characteristic brevity when I asked about a 1% CrV steel, suggested 80CrV2, and maybe seeing the suggestion the 15th time tipped me from feeling like I didn’t need to short carbon well below 1% because I have the skill to work with steels more difficult ….to trying it anyway.

Would We Ever See it in Boutique Tools?

I doubt it. There are some things that I do to chase hardness that require hands on skill and some experience. I’ve now probably heat treated at least 300 items and I have not just heat treated them, but I have been using it as a fun exercise to try to get better and more consistent. I’ve also never had to do it on a Tuesday afternoon with a hangover or organize 50 items at a time. If I harden and temper 10 items in a busy week, that’s a lot, and I usually limit what I’m doing to cycling two items at a time. I’m kind of dumb, and trying to keep track of more than two things that are changing colors and in and out of the forge is a good way to make a mistake.

Why Not 52100 for Tools? It Just Isn’t as Good in Wood as Some Lower Toughness Steels

Well, to start out with, I ended up getting banned from a knifemaking forum because I wanted to talk about heat treating in a forge. But I really went there in the first place to try to find 1095 with upper end of the spec chromium and a little bit of added vanadium. That would make forge heat treatment really easy. It turns out, you can solve (if you’re me) the issues with 1084 and 1095 pretty easily just by manipulating temperatures by eye with some samples, snap them, and then make actual tools with them and confirm they’re better. But I didn’t bother to do that until I got berated about “poor results” from one of the most undesirable individuals I’ve ever met on a forum – Devin Thomas – the father of the metallurgist who did my test results for 26c3 and O1. I later sent more samples, as I’ve mentioned on here, with 1095 and 1084 without looking much at them just to see how they’d turn out.

The 1095 was mediocre and the 1084 was undertough by a lot. What resulted was finding out that though I’ve never talked to Devin, he was pretty pleased to see the second set of results from steels I don’t generally work with and pretty excited to ignore the fact that my other samples were as good (O-1) as book results and never-to-be-mentioned, I guess, far better than furnace schedule results for 26c3. Those weren’t by chance.

What is the problem? Apparently, Devin, who is by others accounts an accomplished maker and provider of some materials to other knife makers, doesn’t like anyone to talk about heat treating in a forge. I don’t really care what he likes, but he doesn’t know much of anything about woodworking tools and I couldn’t get discussion out of anyone else about questions that had nothing to do with it. He gets my award for the least desirable person I’ve come across on any forum for inability to discuss something unrelated to what he wants to drone on about. So, eventually I got banned for talking about heat treating in a propane forge and posting the results because I refused to stop talking about it. The official reason “poor behavior and being suspected as a returning troll”.

This is BS, of course – I don’t have more than one ID on any forum and have a distaste for people who maintain multiple logins. I can’t think of a single person who does that and adds anything positive to any forum.

I may also be underestimating the whims of advertisers on the forum or other paying service providers. In short, talking objectively about what you’re doing and after much goading, showing factual results that aren’t in line with assertions you weren’t asking about in the first place? It must be some kind of threat.

The very simple fact is that by not following published schedules, I got better results than anyone has ever published with 26c3, and it breaks the rules of not normalizing steel and then giving it an austenitizing soak before quenching. I had no idea those things were supposedly rules in the first place. they can be needed for some steels that do need them – 26c3 doesn’t. If far better results than steel done with those steps isn’t proof, I have no clue what is.

What resulted when I was found out to be a forge heat treater and then my comment that I wasn’t getting a furnace in the near future, from Devin, is something I wouldn’t have expected to see from a grown man, but life is full of surprises. I did later scroll back and find out that i’m not the only person who has been subjected to it, and there’s a whole group of (maybe well meaning?) sycophants who will request the moderators ban anyone who posts methods they don’t like. I suspect posting results that support them is even less well liked.

Where does 52100 come into this? I got the same thing I always get from people who have made knives when I don’t mention 52100 as a preferred steel.

What’s the problem?

52100 is very different than other relatively plain steels. It has an amount of chromium in it that gobbles (binds) a lot of carbon so that the carbon doesn’t remain in the lattice/grain framework. It’s also offered in a lot of inexpensive bar stock in very different starting structures. Some of those structures won’t achieve good hardness, especially if you just heat it to nonmagnetic and then quench it.

I have worked enough with it to know that I can get it reasonably hard in the quench – to the point that it’s difficult to deal with sharpening comparatively – in woodworking tools.

The lack of carbon in solution appears to make it too tough. This is a foreign concept for knifemakers – “too tough”. Tough keeps people from breaking knives – they bend instead. I don’t think people have the cajones to return a knife they bent but that didn’t break and then claim they weren’t abusing it. That’s great for a maker. Let’s be honest, too, few people are doing much with custom knives they buy outside of some really strange competitions that look just ourtright weird to anyone who is a woodworker. The average person is pushing a knife through things or slicing with said knife.

When I first started playing with it, I expected to find low hanging fruit, that 52100 hadn’t been used, and maybe it was a mistake not to use it. Maybe the reason was that it was harder to heat treat, or who knows what. I suspect that the early 1900s tools from the carbide patterns that I see are lightly alloyed water hardening steels with some addition of tungsten, and some may be oil hardening steels when they’re solid. but I don’t think I’ve ever used a tool that behaves like 52100.

Everything used in woodworking has enough toughness, but not an excessive amount. You wouldn’t expect to take a chisel, bend it over in a vise into an L and bend it back and not have it break, but 52100 can do things like that without breaking outright.

First Experiements

I made a couple of blades of all kinds. 52100 was one of them. Disregarding effort made, it planes about as long as O1. I didn’t test it directly against O1 right away and figured it should be good. it also has a persistent wire edge at “normal” plane iron hardnesses. In chisels, I found the toughness intolerable – when an edge would deflect it would just stay there increasing the cross section of the edge and making the chisel harder to get through wood. An unexpected problem.

I later compared a couple of the irons that planed about as long as O1 and noticed that as the two steels wear, 52100 takes more effort to keep in the cut and on woods that a plane likes to come in and out of the cut on (figured or runout), the cut was more rough at the same interval. that creates a big difference in physical effort even if both irons plane the same distance, and planes not staying in the cut is part of the reason the average person fails to get a finish ready surface off of a plane. This is what the carbides looked like – they were a little larger than I would’ve expected, but evenly distributed and all in all, not bad.

first shot carbides – not bad. the edge doesn’t look too uneven, but it looks like it doesn’t wear that crisply. This is hard to see, but a more vivid example of this can be found in my prior post about the mountford HSS iron. That iron also fails to cut nicely as it dulls. You get usable resuls, but not as good as steels that established themselves for use in planes and chisels – those being less tough or lower in alloy.

Compare the edge of that picture to O1

Notice the shape of the very edge of O1 – it’s more even and there’s no visual evidence of a thicker initial edge.

I think there is a fundamental difference in how the edge wears – how round or blunt does it get, and how does that effect planing.

O1 does not keep carbon out of solution the same way 52100 does and the alloy is different, but it’s easier for a fast heat treatment process to get a lot of uniformity. I think moving the cap iron around would show a few more carbides, but it’s not a surprise that they aren’t as vivid. the “stuff” remains in solution and creates a problem that metallurgists call plate martensite. This problem reduces toughness…..except for woodworking, I’m not convinced that it’s a problem.

Knife folks are still fixated on the fact that you can break O1 – what are they cutting? I don’t know. I think they cut the cheese more than they cut things with their knives. We don’t have that luxury in woodworking.

I keep coming back to O1 being a really pleasant steel for woodworking, but I’m not trying to create an argument for it – I’m working from outcomes first, which can be unexpected – it shouldn’t be better according to anyone, but if it shows better in outcomes every time, and it’s also easier to heat treat, and the issue of toughness doesn’t apply to us, maybe it would be smart not to deny the outcome. Even if you never figure out the cause, the better performance is right in front of your face. And if you hand plane 15 or 20 board feet from rough in a day, that difference will be drastic. It can work longer into the dulling cycle without you as the “planer” having to sharpen as often or you as the planer leaning on the plane and really creating a lot of problems that are both unpleasant and unproductive.

I also noticed while looking at grain size that these 52100 samples were outright abusive to my vise. I break samples by hitting them with a hammer. I want to see the grain size under a microscope – but you can also feel a difference in how hard you have to hit the steel to break it. A tempered factory file will break easily. A 3/16″ thick sample of 52100 that’s even moderately tempered may actually be a threat to break a vise.

what does that clue us into? the next reasonable thing is to leave it hardly tempered or untempered and see if the edge holds together. it’s really unpleasant to sharpen when it’s left really hard, but it’s not that slow to grind. the washita won’t touch it. Why is this reasonable. It’ll be much less tough at really high hardnesses, but it may still be tough enough almost untempered to plane wood without chipping.

52100 untempered. to my surprise, what no more tempering than it would get just from grinding the initial bevel, it did not chip. the hardness level is absurd. It must be 65 or 66 hardness as it’s relatively low alloy and even an india stone doesn’t do much with it. I think the only thing I’m really doing with the washita if I get a small burr is deflect it. Nobody would ever sharpen this with oilstones.

Figuring it would chip and then I would walk back the temper until it didn’t, I was wrong. it didn’t chip untempered. It was, however, a right bitch to sharpen when compared to tempered irons. Slower even on diamond hones. there’s nothing in it diamonds won’t cut easily, but at some point, harness can be so high that the diamonds don’t penetrate as much.

But…compare the edge to O1. I don’t know if the picture is meaningful, but the edge rounded look is still there………and the result of planing is that it again felt really keen initially and then continued to plane, but it doesn’t have the sweetness of O-1. the combination of attributes doesn’t offer anything. Again, a surprise.

I Put it Aside and Got it Out Later

After being goaded on the blade forums (and then banned for talking about forge heat treatment, or because of the outrage that the topic causes), I decided I’d see if I could get some of the carbides in solution without a furance. I don’t think this would be that hard. Here’s the thought process:

Larrin posted an excellent article about how much differently 52100 turns out in a furance depending on the initial microstructure. Some of this is canceled out by the fact that I use a temperature overshot when heating and no real duration, but probably not all of it.

When I first used 52100, i heated it a couple of times and quenched it, and tried a few things. Since then, I’ve learned to shrink grain with extreme reliability. I also think I can manipulate carbides a little bit without having too much carbon escape the steel. Again, a very high heat overshot, and then something I haven’t done before much – heat to critical with another iron (for mass) and stuff it in vermiculite. the hope is that I will get carbon back into solution (less toughness, higher hardness yet), and the thermal cycles will shrink grain without moving much of the excess carbon in the lattice back into carbides.

I would then follow this up with a temperature overshot quench (heat to a brighter orange as fast as possible then quench as fast as possible back to the lowest temperature possible). I have all of these mule irons on hand already, they’re just waiting to be turned into knives or something instead, but if I can actually change how they look under the scope, I will know I’ve changed the outcome without any question as to the difference in the bar stock used.

So, I did this – I know conceptually this is difficult to follow. But here are the same irons with microscope at same magnification. Apologies if the light reflection is slightly different.

First iron, 350 F temper, which would be untertempered for O1:

Smaller carbides, and seemingly less of them

I would estimate this first iron’s hardness at 62 based on the stones. the washita doesn’t do much with it, but it’s not intolerable. it cuts OK on an india stone. As with prior versions, the burr is persistent, but I’ll let the buffer deal with it.

This is after planing. Look at the edge again – it still looks like it doesn’t have the uniform sweetness.. And it doesn’t. It just doesn’t perform as well with thin shavings.

The hardness is a little better that before. Did I do what I think I’m doing? I have no idea.

so I did one more iron with the same thing, one of the ones previously made, and tempered it at 300F instead. It should be around 64 hardness. It feels like i is. the washita has no interest in it. For reference, the abrasive particles in washita are about the same hardness as rockwell C64. If you slurry an oilstone, it can abrade steels harder than the particles, but the mechanism isn’t by rasping grooves in the steel.

300F tempered iron – high hardness. Still seemingly fewer and smaller carbides.

this harder iron is unpleasant to sharpen if you’re used to something like 62 hardness O1. It’s not more abrasion resistant, it’s just harder.

The edge is maybe slightly finer and if I didn’t take too thin of a shaving, the plane wasn’t unpleasant to use. However, it wasn’t better to use than 62 hardness O1. it still exhibits more of a decline in ease of use through the dulling cycle.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m seeing, but I think for this steel and for 1084 at higher hardness, the edge wearing actually forms a bit of a burr, too, or something that reflects light in an unexpected way.

Whatever it is, the outcome remains the same. It’s just not as nice to use on wood.

And, I think that fact – that you can feel the difference and anyone actually making tools when people were acutally using them could feel the same has a lot to do with why we don’t see ultra high toughness steels in woodworking. No matter how much some knifemaker tells you “it doesn’t make any sense”.

The sharpenability of lower alloy steels like this at really high hardness is there, too. It doesn’t make sense to someone not sharpening in volume why it would be an issue, but you don’t get double the edge life for double the sharpening effort, and that’s ultimately going to be annoying to experienced woodworkers.

Problem Solved with 1084

It’s not that important as it’s not a steel I’ll use for much of anything, but solving the grain growth and proving it is something I wanted to follow up on. I may be repeating something from yesterday’s blog post, but you may recall that I made some samples of 1084 and one that I intentionally overheated but only for a short time showed drastic grain growth.

This is a picture of that sample – for scale, 0.1″ thick.

I can tell what made it grow like this, but the loop isn’t closed until I can set up a process that will shrink the grain regardless of where it starts, and I would at least like it to match the best results with a low temperature heat and quick quench. A furnace may do all kinds of things that improve results greater than grain growth, but I’m only concerned with whether or not the steel is good enough for woodworking and if the cycle can be done easily.

The problem was temperature, though – what 26c3 (1.25% carbon with a small amount of chromium) likes and doesn’t suffer from at all is terrible for 1084. it’s just a little too hot, but only a little.

That means modifying the thermal treatment cycles a little and heating a little bit less upon quench, and then the results with the exact same bloated grain tab above moves back to this on the first try:

This may look minimally different from the heated sample above, but the difference is pretty drastic. Time commitment to shrink the grain and reharden is about 4 minutes on small test coupons like this.

This is visually similar to what it would look like before overheating at all. I’m pleased with this. The change in what I typically would do is very small.

if I have a use for 1084, at some point, i will have samples tested, but right now, the need doesn’t go past good hardness and toughness “good enough”.

Good enough means not chipping in a plane a hardness above 60.

I’ve learned another lesson – don’t ask any questions about heat treatment on a knife forum unless you’re going to nod and say yes when half of the group says “sell everything you’ve got, you’re not getting good results no matter what, and you won’t until you buy a furnace”. But it’s hard to criticize that, how would someone making knives know what works well in a chisel. One is biased toward toughness first, the other toward appropriate hardness (strength). After all, they’re selling boutique knives that people are going to hit with clubs to split wood. We will probably pick up an axe or a froe.

Just how easy this issue (low toughness in my 1084 samples) was to address, first in preventing growth and then in reversing it without a difficult, expensive or time-intensive process does egg on my desire to solve problems rather than only go for the book solution.

If you want to sell things (including yourself), you’ve got to go with the flow. I have no idea why one-dimensional answers have to apply when someone isn’t doing that, though.

Assigning Fault – My Fault Failing with 1084 and 1095

Some time ago, I mastered controlling grain size and manipulating hardness of 26c3 and O1 steel. If this is your first post, you can find what those are with a google search.

The cycle that I published and used works for both of these well. I eventually sent samples to a metallurgist as I posed on a woodworking forum that I doubt that these ever vary by more than a point. This caused some people to call BS, but the hardness part is definitely true. Small variations in hardness around 60-64 cause a great difference in how a plain steel performs on certain stones. These stones are chosen because I know that one of them will begin to slow down on 62 hardness plain steel, a lot, and another will become slow on plain steel that’s more than about 65.

The metallurgist that I sent the samples to, I have a feeling, doesn’t care for my methods. I get that. I don’t normalize steel. I think for plain steel, it’s not necessary, but one has to be willing to snap samples and do some actual testing of results before determining that it’s worth sending something for testing.

When I sent my samples, I didn’t care that much about toughness, but the market for knife makers is much bigger than independent tool makers, so a lot of the testing has a big emphasis on toughness. Toughness has a lot of influence on whether or not someone will break a knife, and in the world of knives, a broken knife is a huge problem.

I sent the samples, asked about hardness, and then got the hardness results first. I was happy with them. The person doing the testing had concerns about the level of finish I did with the test samples (figure a fraction of a stick of gum size) because I had to precisely size and finish these little samples freehand. The tolerances are pretty tight for freehand. However, toughness results were also fine. Compared to hardness, both were as good as the metallurgist’s published results – that is, the toughness and hardness balance was good.

Here is the chart I received – I markered in the 1095 result. That will make sense in a second.

These results are no fluke, but I haven’t worked up and snapped samples for anything else, so I couldn’t guess anything other than hardness, which I can tell on a stone.

Here’s Where I Went Wrong

Out of curiosity, I then sent sample coupons of 1084 and 1095 later, and I heated XHP and sent coupons of that. When I first attempted to match XHP to V11 steel, I heated it very hot very quickly, but later learned that one of the reasons for high heat is to normalize. I’m not normalizing steel, so I didn’t heat the coupons to the same high temperature – in my mind figuring that since I wasn’t dissolving chromium but just hardening a sample, the high temperature wasn’t necessary.

I was wrong. The sample should’ve tested about 60/61 hardness at my tempering level. I’d made two knives with lower heat and they also seemed a little soft – you could just barely file the knives before tempering. They probably are – the test coupon came back 57.3 hardness or some figure within a couple of tenths of that.

I didn’t do my due diligence and attempted to reason into a change without testing it. I also never snapped 1084 or 1095, but just assumed that they would work just as well with the method that I use for 26c3 and O1. Well, they don’t. Off of the top of my head, I believe the 1095 averaged 63.1 hardness and 4.1 or 4.3 ft lbs of toughness. This was with a 400F temper, which is off the charts compared to published results without liquid nitrogen – something I don’t have. I did make a couple of samples of 1095 irons and they are OK, but will nick a little too easily and they were always harder than expected.

Why? I assumed that my prior heat treat cycle would just work and I didn’t so much as snap a single sample before sending anything off for testing.

Bad idea. 1084 was even worse. 61.5 hardness or so on average and toughness even worse than 1095, which is the wrong direction. I was unhappy with the results, but I don’t use any of these steels for anything, and for my own consumption, if I could bump an XHP sample to 58 hardness and just buff the edge to make up for the slight lack of hardness, no real problem. Toughness was good enough that breaking wouldn’t be a problem.

I was so pleased with the 26c3 results and that I’d made a claim of being able to make samples separately without varying hardness that I reasoned that there shouldn’t be an issue, especially with 1084, not testing anything. It’s always suggested as being easier to heat treat than O1 or 26c3. I’ll put aside XHP for now until I have a chance to run another sample to high heat and see if it completely thwarts a good file on a sharp corner. I failed to do something that only takes ten minutes at the most. Create a small coupon for myself and observe grain size.

Yesterday, I finally addressed the 1084 issue by making a couple of samples. I was shocked to find out both with grain snapping and testing with a magnet that what works for 26c3 in a forge is overheating 1084 – a lot. My eye is trained to see the point where 26c3 transitions to nonmagnetic. 1084 transitions (unexpectedly to me, but probably not to others) at a cooler appearing color. And then the second part of the mystery.

I intentionally overheat 26c3 during a quench. It takes about 10 extra seconds to do this and the result is imperceptible change in grain, but higher hardness. This is a nice thing when making chisels, and maybe not worth as much excitement making knives.

You can compare my results to a simple schedule of expected hardness and toughness here – I tempered steel at 390F for 26c3, two tempers. To be conservative, I think it’s also useful to check toughness a point or two softer than my averages as one end of the coupons is a point or two (it varied) less hard because it’s held by tongs and it’s not changing from hot to cold as fast in the quench. As in, my samples average about 63.8, but you could compare chart toughness at 62 and I think that’s fair.

Link to Chart of Expected Results

Link to more about 26c3

No matter how you look at it, the forge results are unexpectedly – at least to me – good. I never sent any of these coupons for analysis until I’d made 26c3 chisels that hold up in side beside testing better than anything else I have that’s not Japanese. But I still figured the samples would have some kind of shortcoming. They didn’t. I think I could do 100 of these on 30 different days and they’d very little.

So, What’s the Problem

The 10 seconds of chasing the heat higher to prep for a fast quench with 26c3, and the same color of thermal cycles that I’d trained myself to see by eye – both grow grain a little in 1095 and a whole lot in 1084.

If I’d done 10 minutes of due diligence and maybe 1 hour of various trials and a little bit of analysis, I’d have known not to send either sample, and in not doing that, I wasted my time and the time of the person doing the testing. But I think in advising against heat treatment, they may have at least gotten some enjoyment out of the fail. I didn’t get a chart for the second set, so I have no chart to display. The results, though, match what I felt with 1095 irons – hard and a little bit under tough for the hardness, and half of the toughness that they would’ve been done properly in a furnace a point or two softer.

I finally started this with an offcut yesterday. It took less than 10 minutes to make these samples. These are 1/10th of an inch thick bar stock. Having little for analysis, what I do to refine cycles (and did for 26c3) is snap samples along with some kind of performance test. The first sample is just whatever the steel is heated once without any intentional overshot and quench.

1084 – low temperature quick quench

Then, I will intentionally overheat a sample, and see what it looks like. This is with about 10 seconds of chasing the quench temperature higher than needed to get better hardness. Exactly what I do with 26c3, which shows no visual change in grain size.

Grain Growth With Minimal Overheating Time – this coarse grain will result in slightly higher hardness but much lower toughness.

This is a shock, and the difference in coarseness is drastic. I’m sure my tested samples were at least as large as this, but they may have grown during thermal cycling. I never broke one to look, but i have looked at 1095 in the past. I didn’t break one of these because I didn’t have extra steel after cutting samples, and if I did break 1095 at or near the same time, it wouldn’t have looked quite this bad. based on the test results.

The steel that is supposedly an easy starting point is no good for what I usually do. so, I made a third sample, increased the grain size slightly and then used lower temperature thermal cycles than what I do for 26c3, and heated it quickly a little hotter than the first sample.

overheat, lower temp thermal cycles, and quench (ignore the bright stuff, that’s actually just a piece of plastic that the sample rests against, and it has a metallic silver finish on it – inconvenient here as it looks like huge metallic grain. the teeth at the bottom are those of a fine/small single cut mill file).

1084 is my worst steel, so it’s the one I’m trying to conquer first.

I can take the unbroken part of the middle sample now and confirm that the grain will get close to #1 above, then I’m well on my way.

And sitting around and guessing at the various problems – a complete time waster (“was it the steel? Maybe it wasn’t rolled and treated well? Maybe it was mixed up with something else?”).

I don’t think any of those happened. I know now that I made bad samples because of an assumption that the cycle used for 26c3 should be fine for any plain steel.

If you are going to do heat treatment in a forge and develop something that’s relatively easy – The 26c3 cycle is easy for me – reflexive at this point – you absolutely have to snap samples and confirm that you can heat treat without increasing grain size before moving on to anything else.

I’ll post tomorrow or in the next few days about the very simple quick method of doing this.

Assigning Fault when Solving Problems

I’ve been making blades out of sharon 50-100 all week – one a day as it’s something I can do in less than an hour, and the ability to use a plane and then examine the edge under a microscope to see what I have is just about the ultimate initial test. If the iron is good, it will sharpen easily and well and wear evenly without chipping and folding.

If it passes that, then it’s time to use it rougher wood. The dilemma in this case is that it’s an antiquated steel by now and the found lot is 0.145″ thick. So, I can make infill irons with it and maybe large moulding irons.

Making a plane iron in a shop without machine tools and then quenching and tempering – especially a water hardening steel that’s just mill finish to begin with – means flattening an iron and getting an initial edge. I consider the entire establishing of the bevel, flattening the back and honing both to be a 10 minute job. I’ve been doing this for a while and have gotten good at all of the steps. That reminds me, I have an improved back flattening jig to share, but I’ll post about that separately.

Forums and Assigning Fault

When you read forums, you’ll hear all kinds of suppositions. Any time someone talks about a commercial iron being chippy or microchippy, or whatever else, I always challenge them to get a hand held microscope and view the edge of the iron before they start planing. A2 is relatively notorious because Lie Nielsen recommends hand grinding it and it’s more resistant to stones than most simpler steels. If someone even manages to properly finish an edge, they’re faced with nicking an iron, perhaps, and having to hand grind out the nicking.

They have practically no chance.

Hand grinding a small nick or small nicks out of an iron means honing off several thousandths of edge length, perhaps 4 or 5 at the most if there isn’t catastrophic damage, and the idea that you’ll do this in the middle of working on something is a no-go. Most of us have calipers – I’d estimate that a brisk sharpening session on a secondary bevel takes about 1 thousandth of length off of an iron.

My point is that what you see occurring is easy to attribute to “microchippiness” of A2. This is often the accusation. However, I fully honed, examined and planed a couple of thousand feet with A2 irons and found no evidence of chipping. The edge can get ever so slightly rough when it’s absolutely dead dull, but what people are generally observing is failure to remove nicks. Not evidence that they’re a victim of a steel that has an underlying monte carlo simulation resident in it to determine when it will mercilessly let out a ball of line-leaving filth.

The failure to get a good surface or good performance of almost any decent tool is either abuse or quite often, blaming damage left in the tool on boogeymen.

Annealed 50-100

I’m looking for super bright and no defects at all on a test edge or test face of a board. This is after dry grinding a full bevel on a new plane iron with a 36 grit belt and then hand honing on an initial microbevel. This is rough treatment – 36 grit ceramic belts grind much cooler than regular belts or a wheel, but they are extremely aggressive. Those two probably go together.

Yesterday while looking at carbides in an annealed iron that’s then quickly quenched – as in, the iron is placed in vermiculite below the temperature where it could be quenched and then it’s allowed to cool slowly in a “sandwich” of pieces of metal. This does nice things to the carbide structure, hopefully making them smaller and more round.

I saw lines on my work. Just two. The annealed iron tempered a point or so softer than another iron I’d done the day before, so I was starting to guess at reasons.

The carbides looked like this.

Small iron and chromium carbides in Sharon 50-100 after planing wear

I scrolled the iron back and forth on the microscope looking for the folded over little area of poor results, and found this.

Artifact damage in the back of a newly made plane iron. Probably from stray grit or hardened burr remnants pinning on an india stone.

I guess it’s hard to complain about the quality of the edge when the diagonal scratch points the finger directly back at me. The height of this picture is only about .0095″ (just under a hundredth of an inch). This garish scratch is a couple of thousandths wide, but it looks pretty spectacular here. Interestingly, the edge seems to be closing over it.

The reality is, the steel isn’t at fault here. I’d like the iron to be a little harder, but could hardly claim the edge folded. This isn’t visible with the naked eye and I’m not sure if there’s even enough there to easily catch a thumbnail.

I fit in my own suggestion here – look to the sharpening first when pointing fingers at a blade or steel and thinking that it’s the blade. In fact, I can rarely count any time other than in rough lumber or knots or silica, where edge damage occurs in regular planing.

This idea of finding the right culprit and not being lazy and attributing it to something else is necessary for solving problems. Even though this is a simple one, the trouble is you’re your own feedback loop. If you have an iron that you often see defects without checking the iron, soon your supposition becomes truth with repetition. Except it’s often not true. That becomes even less helpful when you assert that it is when attempting to help someone else having the same problem.

I’ve removed this scratch, of course. But it’s not something the average person will get out of the back of an iron with 20 extra seconds in a fine waterstone.