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.