03-23-2018, 10:31 PM
There is a lot to ponder in your latest $5.00 knife SET test Mr. EOU, more than I wish to in this post. I would however like to comment on the results of the sharper 168 portion of the blade because that was sharpened most closely to the other tests performed on the unhardened and the HRC 55-57 and HRC 60-60 blades.
The latest $5.00 blade, RHC 50ish, performed better than the cold rolled blade, but not as well as the RHC 55-57 blades. This suggests that harder steel is producing a blade more resistant to dulling, but only to a point. I say only to a point because the HRC 55-57 and HRC 60-61 blades performed similarly to each other.
In other words, it looks like HRC 55-61 blades perform similarly, but anything less hard suffers noticeable performance degradation. Almost like you have further defined the bottom fence. Maybe we could suppose that RHC 55-61 is the “sweet spot” in producing blades that are not too hard to sharpen, are not overly expensive and have similar performance. Maybe that is why all of the common blades we see lie within that hardness range. Duh.
However, it makes me wonder if there may be a next level of increased performance in, say, hardness HRC 65-67. A upper fence delineation. But that is mostly out of curiosity and I really don’t care that much because from what I’ve seen the blade would be excessively expensive, probably very prone to chipping and way too difficult to sharpen.
I do think it would be interesting to perform SET tests on the two blades HRC 55-57 and HRC 60-61 both sharpened to, say, an initial sharpness of 300. I have a suspicion that harder HRC 60-61 steel may perform much better than even slightly softer steel such as HRC 55-75 when not over sharpened. It could very well be that our proclivity to over sharpen edges chasing the dubious and less than useless “scary sharp” negates and obscures the real benefit of fine hard steel.
Umm, congrats on sticking with your vision of the SET and bringing to fruition. It seems to be producing data that is incredibly useful, and is answering very long standing questions that up to this point have only been uselessly blathered about ad-nauseam without resolution. Methinks it is an amazingly admirable accomplishment.
The latest $5.00 blade, RHC 50ish, performed better than the cold rolled blade, but not as well as the RHC 55-57 blades. This suggests that harder steel is producing a blade more resistant to dulling, but only to a point. I say only to a point because the HRC 55-57 and HRC 60-61 blades performed similarly to each other.
In other words, it looks like HRC 55-61 blades perform similarly, but anything less hard suffers noticeable performance degradation. Almost like you have further defined the bottom fence. Maybe we could suppose that RHC 55-61 is the “sweet spot” in producing blades that are not too hard to sharpen, are not overly expensive and have similar performance. Maybe that is why all of the common blades we see lie within that hardness range. Duh.
However, it makes me wonder if there may be a next level of increased performance in, say, hardness HRC 65-67. A upper fence delineation. But that is mostly out of curiosity and I really don’t care that much because from what I’ve seen the blade would be excessively expensive, probably very prone to chipping and way too difficult to sharpen.
I do think it would be interesting to perform SET tests on the two blades HRC 55-57 and HRC 60-61 both sharpened to, say, an initial sharpness of 300. I have a suspicion that harder HRC 60-61 steel may perform much better than even slightly softer steel such as HRC 55-75 when not over sharpened. It could very well be that our proclivity to over sharpen edges chasing the dubious and less than useless “scary sharp” negates and obscures the real benefit of fine hard steel.
Umm, congrats on sticking with your vision of the SET and bringing to fruition. It seems to be producing data that is incredibly useful, and is answering very long standing questions that up to this point have only been uselessly blathered about ad-nauseam without resolution. Methinks it is an amazingly admirable accomplishment.