Coatings

Another question rattling around in my head today.

Why have non-stick coatings not been accepted readily by kitchen knife manufacturers? Is it because of fear of flaking off in food? Sanitation issues? Difficulty in sharpening (I'm thinking clogged stones) Or are knife owners just too stick-in-mud traditionalists to accept them?

Seems to me like a great application of modern science and technology.

-AJ

nonstick coatings will wear or rather quickly, with professional use and you risk the possibility of teflon contamination in your food.

Understood but I'm not thinking Teflon but rather using something like electron vapor deposition and putting on a nitride coating or something. I remeber them coating stuff in the lab in school this way. My favorite were the titanium coated cockroaches grad students would do.

-AJ

I am not going to use a titanium coated cockroach to prepare dinner!

ajhuff said:

Understood but I'm not thinking Teflon but rather using something like electron vapor deposition and putting on a nitride coating or something. I remeber them coating stuff in the lab in school this way. My favorite were the titanium coated cockroaches grad students would do.

-AJ

Click to expand...

AJ,
I tried TiN coating some CPM 10V blades that I made for swivel knives looking to reduce friction and corrosion. What happened was that the residual acids in the leather as well as the abrasion factor (µ x contact area) caused rapid removal of the TiN. I have ESM images of the effect. It would be interesting to see what food acids would do to it. After we conducted our testing I presented the results to the TiN applicator and he made it very clear that TiN works great for high abrasion situations provided pH neutral are slightly alkaline conditions which is the case with most machine tool coolants. He then presented a verbal case against TiN for any type of corrsion resistance....especially in an acid environment. This did however contradict what I would have thought given the elemental characteristics of Ti and N.
TiN coated cockroaches....sounds like a bad cult movie to me...."Iron Man VS TiN Roach"

PZ

I'm not sure what the right coating would be. Lots of options out there. Could be a basic Chrome oxide or Alumina or SiC or maybe Boron Carbide. I don't know. I'm sure some have worse friction or sticking while I bet a few out there are much better.

What's the hard black coating on tactical knives?

-AJ

I actually have several old case plated kitchen knives and the Chrome is pretty tough and fairly corrosion resistant, but once it gets the chrome disease, there is no stopping it. I do believe that coating is called parkerization and doesn't work on stainless steel. It is an anti corrosion coating. There are some baked on polymer coatings that work well, but are quite expensive.

Some folks would probably tell you that coated blades, especially the ceramic "paint" ones, are not for you THIN edge guys.