What is the best steel currently available for knives, chisels,

>>56121911
Titanium coated steel alloy

>>56121911
Also not the place to be asking that

>>>/k/

>>56121911
> knives, chisels, and other bladed cutting tools
if you ask like that, it proves you have no clue about metal working or you are just baiting.

>>56121911

Honestly, I don't know. Google shouldn't be all that hard for this question. There are different qualities for different uses that will give you a selection of possibilities. There are tradeoffs between hardness and brittleness vs. longest edge life & difficulty in obtaining it. Look up what the pro knife forge gurus use, and what Japanese woodworkers use for their premium chisels.

Also try >>>/diy/ and >>>/k/ with your question.

You will be faced with ultimate choices on the hardest, perfect surgical edge and losing pieces of it due to brittleness, depending on what type of tool you have in mind and how you will use it. Be prepared to describe what exactly you need this info for and how you intend to use it if you want the best advice from people on what to consider.

I like a high carbon steel that is very brittle for my straight razors, because I can easily put an incredible edge on them and maintain it with common materials. If I want to make a combat/survival knife, I'd certainly want an "indestructible" stainless steel, but I'd also have to invest in sharpening gear to put & maintain a proper edge on that, and expect to spend a lot more time doing it.

Japanese folded steel 1000 times

>>56121911
Chromium-vanadium steel

Diamond is the hardest metal.

>>56121911
Nippon steel folded 1000 times

>>56121911
High-carbon steel for knives. Or a high-carbon alloy with additions to increase hardness.
For chisels, medium carbon content is better, as high-carbon would be too brittle to withstand repeated hammering for any practical amount of time and could also easily shatter, hurting you.
and overall, I'd stay clear off stainless steel. Shit's too brittle.

Regular carbon steel
S30v
Vg10
Infi

>>56121911
GNU/Steel

>>56122352
>Not BSDeel

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>>56122302
DIAMOND IS NOT A METAL SHITLORD!

>>56122421
you're wrong

>>56121911
All of those things require different steels. There are specialized products for each of those applications. For knives im partial to s30v or s60v

>>56122421
Fun fact: neither is graphite.

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>>56122421
correction

>>56121911
There is only the best for a given application and that can vary a lot given certain preferences.

High carbon steel is pretty good though.

Are you cutting vegetables?

There isn't one, it's a series of advantages and disadvantages. For example, for SHARPEST OF SHARP you'll want a high-carbon knife that can slice through the universe, but it'll rust very easily if you don't treat it right. It's also fairly soft. So for a camping trip you'll want something else - harder and stainless steel. It's all about what you're gonna need it for.
There are shit steels though.

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>>56121911
The best metal for a knife is not the best metal for a chisel.

There's practical metals and there's over kill metals for things like that, You could make a titanium knife but there would be little point, like those gaudy gold guns.

>>>/diy/

>>56122684
>>56122322

High-carbon steel is as descriptive as saying "magnetic cast iron". Any steel used for blades is going to be a high carbon steel, since high carbon content is needed to make hard steel.

The best steels for knives are the modern stainless steels like 154CM and S30V. The chromium content in stainless makes them harder, hold a better edge, and are more durable than steels that are prone to rusting. Chromium is hard stuff.

>>56122847
A titanium knife would be borderline worthless, because titanium is a lot softer than tool steel.

MechE. here

High carbon oil or water hardening steels are popular with knifemakers. The key is to apply a heat treatment to the material once you've adequately formed the workpiece into the shape you want.

You'll want to quench for hardness, followed by tempering for durability.

>>56122884
Depends what you want to use it for, tool steel is brittle.

>>56121911
Rearden Steel

>>56122961
If you're making a butter knife, your only requirement is to use a material harder than butter.

I'd probably use something like Uddeholm Elmax SuperClean.

As a machinist I've never cut that exact type of steel, but Uddeholm delivers some great steels for a lot of purposes.

>>56122862
154CM isn't even that hard.

>>56121911
M390, K390, S30V, S125V ... Basically any high-vanadium vapor-deposited carbon steel is an excellent choice for cutting tools.
It doesn't have the best impact resistance like softer steels, but the combination of wear resistance and durability is very good.

>>56122151
>>56122317
They folded steel to remove impurities and homogenize the molecular structure of the material, but modern vapor-deposited steel is manufactured flawlessly on a molecular level, there's no reason to forge it, just cut, grind and treat it into the final shape and you're done, there's nothing you can improve by hand that advanced machinery hasn't already done for you.

Fuck steal, just buy full titanium knife

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJrGA3J0nB8

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Crab snibs . Kill a crab if you can manage to , the take the snib and sharpen it with a diamond abrasive till it's sharp enough .

>>56122961
>too brittle
since he's talking about knives, that should not be too much of a problem...
>muh bataning
It's a knife, not a fucking axe. If you smack your knife, you don't fucking deserve it.

>>56124898
>don't smack your knife
You're like those people that get upset when you push a cd tray to get it to retract

>>56123487
>grind
Way to ruin the temper.

Adamantium

>>56122599
>What will happen?
It will all shatter to a million fucking pieces.

>>56121911

whatever scalpels are made of.

>>56125224
Can't you temper it afterwards? Why wouldn't that work?

>>56121911
>steel
literally deprecated

http://www.geaviation.com/press/military/military_20150210.html

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>Not using Glorious Nippon Katana folded steel 1000 times

>>56125460
Cut enough bones and it shatters. Good times.

>>56121911

Mithril

S30v and VG10 are pretty good for things like that.

It really does depend on what your exact intentions for using it are.

>>56122151
4 times folder bog-iron for maximum pillaging.

A2 is the ideal combination of edge retention, toughness, and corrosion resistance.

I have chisels in A2. They are noticeably better than typical CrV chisels.

>>56125458
well, ceramic knives are popular for home users, they are very hard and dont need sharpening to retain their blade and dont tarnish like steel.
But they are very brittle so the pros dont use them.

>>56130497
They also don't get sharp like steel does.

>>56121911
Any super allow used for heavy duty springs in mining mining gear.

Problem is paying for it and someone being able to work on it.

Also the material is not really that important after you check some requirements.

It's more about the grind and shape.

Damascus steel

Valyrian steel

>>56121928
>steel alloy
You basically just set wet water.

>>56123972
This guy spent so much time and money on a really fucking shitty looking, stubby-ass, likely incredibly unbalanced, knife. He couldn't spend just a few more minutes designing a better knife before spending more than a week making it?

>>56130981
meme

Damascus steel was never very strong nor did it have a very sharp edge. Those were all legends that didn't hold up. It just looked pretty.

>>56121911

There is no such thing as a best steel for diverse applications. It's like asking whether a marathon runner or sprinter are faster. It depends.

Each steel is a particular set of tradeoffs between strength, toughness, wear resistance, apex stability, ease of heat treating, cost, corrosion resistance, and resistance to detempering at high heat.

Most folding knife buyers today tend to favour steels with very high non-iron carbide volumes (e.g. s30v, k390, s110v), steels which are well suited for being run at wide angles (~20 degrees per side) with coarse edges, and for retaining a "working sharpness" for very long time between sharpenings.

Most kitchen knife enthusiasts today prefer extremely fine grained pure carbon steels or nearly pure carbon steels at very high hardness.

These are steels that have much higher apex stability (resistance to microscopic rolling or chipping in thin sections), but low wear resistance. That makes them very well suited to the thin edges and higher polished edges of kitchen knives, which blunt mostly from cutting board contact and not from abrasion.

People who insist on using belt sanders to sharpen their knives should look for knives made from High Speed Steels which were designed to not be detempering by high temperatures and this which will have a much lower risk of having their heat treat damaged by power sharpening without active liquid cooling.

And so on.

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>>56122421
ok fag

>>56121911
http://www.mmc-hitachitool.co.jp/e/

>>56123487
>wat is grain structure

>>56121936
>knives are weapons
>>>/trash/

>>56132688
Get a life
.
.

Bin that knife!

I've found some rare monography (there were only like 150 printed) on properties and production of wootz/bulat steels.
So, best wootz samples beat many of modern high-alloy steels, but only when making cutting tools.
Also, it is very difficult to forge and work wootz blanks correctly then HT finished blade to make best of it.

The hardest material in existence that has been made not too long ago is a mix of gold and titanium.
It's supposed to increase prosthetic life by 10 times and shit.
They couldn't even grind it with a diamond coated mill.

>>56133113
Hihihi

*farts

POOP!

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The VG-Max on my Japanese Shun knives cannot be beat.

By Western knives, anyways. It poops all over the German brands. Western knives need to be made twice as thick to not self-destruct but this Japanese steel keeps on trucking.

>>56133140
>handcrafted
>classic
>japan

trash.png

There are best steels for different applications. Varying degrees of effectiveness. You don't use a super hard steel for a knife since it might shatter. Or one that's too soft for a file.

>>56121911
you need to be more specific about your use case

scalpels will be a very soft steel that can be made into very sharp edges but won't be durable at all

chisels are at the other end of the spectrum

>>56121911
ZDP-189 is nice

>>56121911
just go to a junkyard and find a leaf spring, that shit could withstand the apocalypse

>>56121911
Absolutely not all the same. Even within knives there are various steels that give them the "best" properties for what they need to do.

'cause one guy wants his knives to be sharpened to a perfect edge easily and the other to an okay edge, but less frequently.

And one knife has a super fine blade for fine work and the other is a big chopper that works more like an axe.

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>>56133140
>It poops all over the German brands.
I disagree. I do have VG Max and about other Japanese steels (most of them not stainless).

But they are not actually *better* for knives than what Güde or other German quality brands use and make. I actually prefer the Güde steel and knife shapes for a lot of work.

And I do have a decent number of Japanese knifes.

>>56137551
German knives are twice as thick.

No one can deny that Japanese knives have far better cutting performance.

>>56137950
Germany could easily make knifes half as thick as Japan (and could long easily have - its not like the European steel industry is worse than Japan's - probably the opposite, actually, right to this day). They'd just wear down quicker for no particular practical advantage.

The German / Swiss knife designs are just a better choice for many tasks IMO. Plus they usually make better western style grips, even more so if you want high-end plastics.

>>56138209
>half as thick
>wear down quicker
How exactly are you using your knives?