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What confuses me the most is that you seem to be concentrating on CATRA as if that is the only test Larrin has done and then claimed that the results of that test can predict all knife performance in every situation. It feels like you saw one graph which didn't agree with your experience and decided that all of his testing must be wrong. This reminds me of when he published his huge study of initially 48 steels and the whole knife world exploded because many, including some makers felt insulted that their favorite steels got low scores. Larrin provides all sorts of tests including wear resistance, toughness, corrosion resistance, hardness, microstructure, etc. He explains his testing, conclusions and ideas of what the results imply or why they turned out that way. Sometimes he is surprised with the results himself and wants to do further studies. What else do people want from him? Do you actually expect him to test your particular application and your particular preferences? You are being asked about your background not because you have to be a maker, but because what you've wrote sounds pretty ignorant of the subject discussed. You say you have basic understanding of the metallurgy and knife design, but it doesn't come through in what you write. It is very difficult for me to believe that after reading everything Larrin posted you can come to a conclusion that he has some sort of an agenda or that he even claims that wear resistance or high carbide volume are everything in a knife. I've never seen or heard him claim this, so I am not sure where you got this.

Then you challenge others to do stuff for you. You ask people to sharpen their knives a certain way to prove something to you. You ask makers how their steel of choice benefits you for your particular application. Then you seem to be surprised at the reaction you receive🤷‍♂️

So far you haven't proven anything and worse you haven't shown anything. It is pretty simple. Take a few knives in low alloy steel and high alloy steels, make sure geometry is the same, hardness is the same, etc and do your own "real world" testing. Then report back. Please include data, testing methodology, high zoom images of the edge and any other relevant data. Sharpen them to whatever angle you want with whatever you want. We can then discuss your results. I suspect that after doing this you will get results similar to what Larrin reports, not just in CATRA, but in the combined body of his work. Kitchen knives are not magic and their performance can be predicted and explained, but to do this good data is required. It is very easy to criticize someone else's work without contributing, it is much harder to actually do something useful. I am sure that if you came in with good data that contradicted Larrin's we would gladly discuss it and Larrin would do the same. As is, so far you haven't contributed anything just attacked a few people, whined about being attacked and demanded others to do something for you.
Very well spoken.
 
The_Real_Self said himself he has ZERO real world experience with super steels in his kitchen. We have 8 years of real world experience with K390 and other super steels in the kitchen environment. Yet, he is still arguing that K390 is not good for kitchen use. How can anyone take this man seriously?
 
The_Real_Self said himself he has ZERO real world experience with super steels in his kitchen. We have 8 years of real world experience with K390 and other super steels in the kitchen environment. Yet, he is still arguing that K390 is not good for kitchen use. How can anyone take this man seriously?
I know you are a bit newer here but the more and more I've been on here the more I've realized this weird hatred by some of PM steels by a decent bunch, be it because they think ancient japanese blacksmithing with carbon steels and heat treating under the moonlight is magic and superior or what.

There is also a very small faction of PM steel people that would scoff at any hitachi carbon knife but I think that number is pretty low.

Thankfully I think the majority are like me. I like everything. We all have tons of knives. I like having a knife that is always sharp, and I like knives that patina and I find joy in sharpening and getting razor sharpness in 2 minutes. It's so boring to only be into one thing.

I think this is just one pretty bad troll attempt lol
 
The points made are of no use to the party concerned. Since that party is not the OP he can be safely ignored. He's now retracted of some of the stuff he said in slippy ways, and cannot even seem to prioritize effectively what he should retract himself about and what can still stand grounds.

Since he is articulate, and not wrong about some of the data, he clearly just didn't read deeply enough into it. Otherwise, seems also to lack experience with enough steels and enough applications to make some insightful claims at any rate. He's not the first, nor the last, to be getting himself in the useless AS is King argument. A bit sadly as well, he doesn't seem to realize what his ignorance is setting his claims against in the end.

If only of what he says of Larrin, he has been missing the most strongest point and continuous discussion Larrin maintained since he began: the inscription of the theory into the practice, and how testing supports back the theory to a very wide extent. The data he accumulated that does reflect just about seamlessly on the theory is extensive.

The times where it goes against the grain are rare compared with all that fits about as expected. The construct still generally stands the ground at any given time and any given point for most of the data collected. The correlations there are massive. Yet he's not throwing it into anybody's face. He'll readily identify a blip, and discuss realistically of inherent validity of the results until an explanation can be provided that can be backed up with further testing. He does leave one or two hypotheses as to why it might have happened, will readily submit than an error was made, and has been known to suggest such explanations in the early out to later see them at least solidified in further testing. Hell a few times he radically shifted the scope of his methodology according to such blips and his hunch about the phenomenon behind it, at once always expanding on or refining his processes. He's not shy of confronting the theory, or his own means of experimenting, when something blips. That's the fuel that drives the rest, ever opening new areas where he needs to find ground, then channel his work to encompass what's left unaccounted for at the many crossroads between the theory, the lab, and the first hand experience of the maker/user of the steels.
 
My 2 belated cents - though I probably should know better than to koin in a dumpster fire:
-When you start proposing people to put a 6 dps edge with an 8 dps bevel it makes me think you understand very little of what actually makes a kitchen knife cut well. It's not the edge geometry, it's about the geometry just behind the edge.

-Similarly, most recent insights on cutting performance related to kitchen usage in heavily focus on anything but the edge, because the edge (just like the steel) is only a small factor in performance. Heck, at this point the majority of people probably doesn't even finish on very high polish.

-It's a bit confusing to me that you'd chastize someone with a Phd in metallurgy for using an industry standard that is used the world over as if that's somehow a weird thing to do that requires elaborate justification.
It may not be perfect but at least it's repeatable. Scientific rigor is exactly why it's used.

-Larrin's article about the cumulative impact of acid exposure is a good example of other testing that he performed that really changes the picture for kitchen usage.

-Any statements about stereotypical Florida man are baseless gender assumptions that have no place here. There's no reason Florida woman couldn't be equally obnoxious. ;)
 
I didn’t like the graph results since the HRCs don’t line up properly ie blue 1 and blue super. Either the makers are lying or his data isn’t reliable.

Here’s something else that’s interesting as well, how do the different steels polish? Do they tend to look clear or foggy.

I like blue steel a lot for this reason as well as it becomes incredibly clear with the right stones.

With all that said I guess the only thing to do is to create another independent study and consider different tests and see if the results are similar.
 
Let's back the truck up.

Real Self - Some editing has taken place. Pls note it.

You are certainly welcome to have your own opinions and to express them here. But with that freedom of expression there comes some responsibility.

You may question Larrin's work, applicability, observations, conclusions, whatever. And you can do it here. While I can't speak for him I think it's likely he would welcome informed, civil, discourse. Throwing rocks at him with no standing is bad form and you have been rightly called out for it by other members.

Your analogies suck. They won't be tolerated. I've explained that, I won't argue about it. No more.

You may not "attack" other members. This is a gentleman's forum and you and others are expected to interact accordingly.

You singlehandedly took this thread down the crapper. First and last request to make your case more civilly in the future.

(Note that the Jeep / Porsche comparison is fair game and was not edited.)

I'll turn comments back on now.

Can you please note specific quotes where I have attacked other members here? How have I thrown rocks at Larrin specifically? I have asked if anybody can show documentation of his type of testing (CATRA) actually correlating to real world use. Nobody can provide such data so far and as far as I know Larrin's most definitely using that test. My disapproval is not necessarily with Larrin as much as the test being a very small piece of data which people can and often do entirely focus on with tunnel-vision as though it's the most important factor in a knife holding an edge.

The_Real_Self said himself he has ZERO real world experience with super steels in his kitchen. We have 8 years of real world experience with K390 and other super steels in the kitchen environment. Yet, he is still arguing that K390 is not good for kitchen use. How can anyone take this man seriously?

How can anyone take you seriously when what appears to be a very simple and straightforward question directed towards you of how your 'Super Steel' knives would benefit me directly over my lowly White #1 Fujiwara (given the parameters for my use that I've outlined) and you have not even begun to attempt to give me a clear answer but rather appealed to the masses who are in lockstep. If the steels you produce knives with are in fact 'super' would that not make the steel I use something on the level of somewhere below 50 feet of crap according to your marketing and having virtually no alloy content? I am still waiting for you to either tell me my knife is complete garbage and I'm wasting 100's of hours a year sharpening my knife or heck, maybe even agree with me that you don't see how your steels would improve my work efficiency in the kitchen.
 
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Dave, I’m waiting for you to discover the non-Florida Deep South and Appalachia and eagerly await you revising your position on jersey. 😂

Regarding the original topic, the more time I spend with knives in hand the more convinced I am that HRC is more important than the carbides for most kitchen use. As pointed out, for things with light board contact that benefit from the kind of toothiness most knife channels are testing with rope cutting, such as sujis then I would guess a high carbide monster really shines. My experience with most high carbide steels though, is limited to the pocket knife world where makers don’t tend to crank the hardness because they know some yahoo is gonna use the knife to secure a public restroom door with a busted lock. I’ve got some of spydercos 15V work, but I frankly haven’t had the opportunity or reason to really push it so I can’t speak to it, but most of my other super steels have been in the upper 50’s low 60’s range which I frankly find to be meh. On the other hand.

That’d line up with your findings owl, because Kaijus apparently run at 65HRC and Denkas are also in that range if memory serves. The other thing I would suspect, is they could possibly be extremely thin behind the edge. My watanabe is in that boat. The zero grind it came with made the initial sharpenings frankly ludicrously sharp, in ways I haven’t gotten any other knife to myself, or received any other knife from another maker like.

From actual kitchen knife usage, I have VG10 running at about 61HRC, I also have AEBL at about 63HRC, blue #2 at 63-65. Per the charts, the VG10 should absolutely outperform the other two by a significant margin. In practice, I find it loses what passes for ‘sharp’ in my book, which is nothing fancy, just the ability for the steel to bite a fingernail, significantly faster than either of the other two. It continues to perform ‘fine’, but it loses the edge I prefer my knives to have.

I find the questioning of larrin’s character to frankly be silly at best and distasteful at worst. He’s been nothing short of extremely helpful when I’ve asked him questions and his testing has always been as transparent as you can possibly get for testing. He normally states who supplied or forged the knife, who did the sharpening and what the HRC range is. He isn’t hiding anything nor does he have an ulterior motive. Luckily, steel testing is something anyone with an inclination can do if you believe you can’t trust his extensive library of articles for some reason. Bess testers are pretty widely available, and so is the jute rope every YouTuber loves using for cut testing. It may not be catra levels of replicable, but it’s plenty for you to source steel of known HRC and put whatever DPS you want on it. I’d love to see the chart of your findings if you do get around to it since the more data the happier I am, but again I personally appreciate everything larrin has done for the community and his site remains my first stop when I have questions about a steel.


So thanks for cleaning up the thread Dave, we forgive you for being from Florida. 😜

I don't have a problem with Larrin's character as though he is intentionally doing something malicious but he is in a unique position where he can easily spread a lot of information that gives the wrong idea to many whether he realizes it or not. I understand that he does try to contribute a lot to this community and that is appreciated certainly. I just question whether he is doing more harm than good at times, unintentional or not.

Your anecdotal kitchen knife usage illustrates the point I am trying to make here... does a CATRA have ANY relevance whatsoever if you are not cutting to very low sharpness levels? I would argue that it does not as the test simply continues far too long to be meaningful to my usage. What appears very high performance according to CATRA type testing? High carbide PM steels. It's simply a matter of knowing what it is actually testing and why.

VG-10 is a high carbide steel at around 15 percent or more carbide volume. The problem with these types of steels is that they have to give up something in order to attain the carbide volume. One of those things happens to be edge stability, which is heavily tied to carbide volume with an inverse relationship. Secondly, all of that wear resistance actually ends up working against you when you are trying to actually wear the steel away to sharpen it.
 
I don't have a problem with Larrin's character as though he is intentionally doing something malicious but he is in a unique position where he can easily spread a lot of information that gives the wrong idea to many whether he realizes it or not. I understand that he does try to contribute a lot to this community and that is appreciated certainly. I just question whether he is doing more harm than good at times, unintentional or not.

Your anecdotal kitchen knife usage illustrates the point I am trying to make here... does a CATRA have ANY relevance whatsoever if you are not cutting to very low sharpness levels? I would argue that it does not as the test simply continues far too long to be meaningful to my usage. What appears very high performance according to CATRA type testing? High carbide PM steels. It's simply a matter of knowing what it is actually testing and why.

VG-10 is a high carbide steel at around 15 percent or more carbide volume. The problem with these types of steels is that they have to give up something in order to attain the carbide volume. One of those things happens to be edge stability, which is heavily tied to carbide volume with an inverse relationship. Secondly, all of that wear resistance actually ends up working against you when you are trying to actually wear the steel away to sharpen it.
Testing is useful, you should do some.

Hoss
 
this member has judged me on some level and completely canceled my views.
You have a right to make your questionable argument constructed in bad faith, but it’s not being ‘cancelled’ if you get lit up by other members who disagree, and similarly it’s the prerogative of the individual to choose to block you if they want to. It goes both ways.

In actual fact, @daveb graciously allowed you to stay even though you violated the forum rules by insulting numerous categories of people and individual members here, all the while adding little positive contribution to the conversation.

Instead of declaring that everyone else here is blindly following the hivemind because they disagree, you could show some humility instead of doubling down. That may temper some of the hostility being levied your way.

@daveb @OwlWoodworks and the other users who were interested in having a civil debate on the original topic - I apologise for my contribution to this thread hitting the skids, but I was shocked by some of the comments made last night and felt strongly that it needed to be called out. It's disappointing to see @The_Real_Self has shown no contrition or awareness of how their comments were out of order and is now playing the victim.

I'm going to park it there from me for now, cheers.
 
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Your anecdotal kitchen knife usage illustrates the point I am trying to make here... does a CATRA have ANY relevance whatsoever if you are not cutting to very low sharpness levels? I would argue that it does not as the test simply continues far too long to be meaningful to my usage. What appears very high performance according to CATRA type testing? High carbide PM steels. It's simply a matter of knowing what it is actually testing and why.
Your question is answered here: Which Steel Has the Best Edge Retention? Part 2 - Knife Steel Nerds
 

Thanks @Larrin - earlier this year one of your articles convinced me to switch my edges from 15 to 12 dps.

As a side note Larrin’s articles remind me of my Bayesian statistics professor who insisted on very precisely worded language. Answering an exam question with, “The probability of drawing a blue ball is 50%” would be marked wrong. The only acceptable answer would be along the lines of, “Over an infinite number of trials we expect the number of blue balls drawn to approach 50%,”

It’s a subtle but significant difference in meaning which might well go unnoticed by a casual reader who hasn’t had some introduction to that type of language and nuance.

Anyway, if anyone takes the time to read Larrin’s articles carefully I’m not sure how they could accuse him of drawing unwarranted conclusions or making unbacked assertions, tbh.
 
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Dave, I’m waiting for you to discover the non-Florida Deep South and Appalachia and eagerly await you revising your position on jersey.

The Navy had me in Bayonne for a week once upon a time. And I've flown in and out of Newark a jillion times - I gotta wait for someone to put gas in the rental car? And they only come over if I wave a twenty out the window? Don't think I'm revising any time soon.

Florida Man (as far as I know) got it's start in a Carl Hiaasan novel. Hilarious. And somewhat true.
 
The Navy had me in Bayonne for a week once upon a time. And I've flown in and out of Newark a jillion times - I gotta wait for someone to put gas in the rental car? And they only come over if I wave a twenty out the window? Don't think I'm revising any time soon.

Florida Man (as far as I know) got it's start in a Carl Hiaasan novel. Hilarious. And somewhat true.
Oh I absolutely agree that the position of Jersey and Oregon has on self service pumps is moronic to the point of needing to be institutionalized. I forgive them both because Oregon exists as a budget Washington and Jersey as a suburb of NYC.

I have no such defense for many of the states that measure the speed of speaking in seconds per syllable though 😂

Regarding high HRC steels, I’d like to see some of Kknives flexible ceramic made for actual knife users instead of for the mass market. I found the rahven products to hold a serviceable edge for frankly an absurd amount of time even with in the hands of my family who treat every knife like they’re old wusthofs. With thinner geometry I’m guessing they would straight up win the suji game forever. With the flexibility of the material and the crazy hardness I bet they could maintain a wicked apex that gives that sharpness people love about Denkas.
 
Thanks @Larrin - earlier this year one of your articles convinced me to switch my edges from 15 to 12 dps.

As a side note Larrin’s articles remind me of my Bayesian statistics professor who insisted on very precisely worded language. Answering an exam question with, “The probability of drawing a blue ball is 50%” would be marked wrong. The only acceptable answer would be along the lines of, “Over an infinite number of trials we expect the number of blue balls drawn to approach 50%,”

It’s a subtle but significant difference in meaning which might well go unnoticed by a casual reader who hasn’t had some introduction to that type of language and nuance.

Anyway, if anyone takes the time to read Larrin’s articles carefully I’m not sure how they could accuse him of drawing unwarranted conclusions or making unbacked assertions, tbh.
Yeah I think this cuts down to the issue.
Any sort of these numbers are just specific to the test result, but people with a less scientific background or who don't do the reading will over-generalize the results. Then you end up with people saying things like "Anything other than these 3 steels is crap" and "Magnacut at 62 HRC is crap". You see this a lot in the media where a scientific study will say something like "people who eat X have been observed to have slightly higher morbidity; these are the limitations of this study: ..." and the media will pick it up and say "If you eat X, you will die young"
 
Yeah I think this cuts down to the issue.
Any sort of these numbers are just specific to the test result, but people with a less scientific background or who don't do the reading will over-generalize the results. Then you end up with people saying things like "Anything other than these 3 steels is crap" and "Magnacut at 62 HRC is crap". You see this a lot in the media where a scientific study will say something like "people who eat X have been observed to have slightly higher morbidity; these are the limitations of this study: ..." and the media will pick it up and say "If you eat X, you will die young"
Precisely, people read 1-2 articles out of a hundred or look at a graph or two and draw conclusions without any basis or understanding. Then blame the scientist for stating something that was never said or implied. Pathetic really, but happens all the time unfortunately. We are all guilty of it one way or another. It is just too easy to be lazy, speaking from experience.
 
We’ve made and used lots of knives from lots of different steels over the years. Jackie has no idea what any of the gibberish means concerning steel and hrc etc. She will comment on the beauty of a knife. Having no idea what the knife is made from, her favorite steel is 26c3 (spicy white).

Hoss
 
We’ve made and used lots of knives from lots of different steels over the years. Jackie has no idea what any of the gibberish means concerning steel and hrc etc. She will comment on the beauty of a knife. Having no idea what the knife is made from, her favorite steel is 26c3 (spicy white).

Hoss

Sounds like my wife. She thinks the steel names are hilarious.
 
The Chromium addition in ApexUltra, seems to be borrowed from 52100. Been awhile since I read the article, so not sure if that was mentioned.
Screenshot_20230926-101450.png
 
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