Plane Tool steel versus Plain Tool steel!

[Hmerkle]

Great Blog post from Paul Sellers!

Edge Fracture – Is It More or Less Likely With A2 Steels?

http://paulsellers.com/2014/04/edge-fracture-is-it-more-or-less-likely-with-a2-steels/

 

[Mark Gottesman]

Ah, the riddle of steel, the riddle of sharp.

There is usually a trade off in every steel between hardness and ability of the steel to avoid degrading under hard use. The harder you get the sharper you can get, but that hardness makes it likely to fracture and flake. Think glass.

There are steels that would hold up to the rigors of woodworking, but you can't easily sharpen them in a shop. Think Carbide.

Also, achievable sharpness depends upon the size of the structures that are realized during the heat treatment.

D2 would be excellent, but it is tricky to heat-treat properly and again sharpening is not the easiest. It is a steel that was designed for metal punching dies. Some knifemakes use it, but it is a bear to grind.

The new Powder metal blades offer a lot of promise due to the ability to dry mix and hot press the metal stock. It avoids some of the burnout and segregation problems that come from melting and rolling out the stock. It also allows for some very favorable crystalline structures during heat treatment.

Then there is the theory that laminating a simple carbon steel to a low carbon or wrought iron backer allows the backer to act as a sort of shock absorber. Not sure about that, but laying on an edge allows you to only put the good stuff where you need it and replace it when it is worn out.

What I do do know is that a stock blade, properly sharpened and installed in a tuned body gives results that are fine for me. The edge stays sharp enough for the results I'm looking for and resharpening is not a herculean task.

 

[Hmerkle]

I think it would be fun to find a good piece of sword steel.

One of those fictional "Folded a thousand times forged under a new moon"

And see how that edge would hold and how hard it would be to sharpen etc.

As you point out Mark - this is all "Mind fodder" my 1900's blades in my Stanley Baileys perform as well as a new wood river plane!

By adding a Hock or IBC blade it just gets better...

 

[Mike Davis]

I am really amazed at my Veritas blade. I was planing white oak last night and pulling off tissue paper fine ribbons for 30 minutes and never stopped to sharpen.

 

[Hmerkle]

It would be fun to look at your veritas, a hock and an IBC and see if there are appreciable differences!

 

[Willemjm]

Interesting article, thanks for posting.

I always thought my old vintage Stanley planes, with their original irons work better than A2, but regarded it as probably incorrect perception.

Experience has taught me though, not to believe the manufacturers claim of steel composition. Recently I tried to part a 316 stainless steel pipe on my wood lathe with a wood lathe parting tool. While the exercise was not very successful, my claimed Sorby A2 parting tool showed no wear. On the other hand my claimed Asian A2 parting tool had its edge destroyed almost immediately.

 

[Hmerkle]

Interesting article, thanks for posting.

I always thought my old vintage Stanley planes, with their original irons work better than A2, but regarded it as probably incorrect perception.

Experience has taught me though, not to believe the manufacturers claim of steel composition. Recently I tried to part a 316 stainless steel pipe on my wood lathe with a wood lathe parting tool. While the exercise was not very successful, my claimed Sorby A2 parting tool showed no wear. On the other hand my claimed Asian A2 parting tool had its edge destroyed almost immediately.

That is why I say it would be fun to do some side by side comparisons...

You have some empirical data that "A2" tool steel is not the same the world over!
There are additives that make the base material better or take the heat treat or annealing better and in the end make a better cutting tool.

You go back to the original trials of using carbide as a wood cutting tool and "Everyone" saying that just won't work, but now we take it for granted, but it took engineering and trials and errors to make it work - so too we look at veritas, hock, IBC, etc. and know before we go very far each of them is going to act differently...

 

[Willemjm]

That is why I say it would be fun to do some side by side comparisons...

You have some empirical data that "A2" tool steel is not the same the world over!
There are additives that make the base material better or take the heat treat or annealing better and in the end make a better cutting tool.

You go back to the original trials of using carbide as a wood cutting tool and "Everyone" saying that just won't work, but now we take it for granted, but it took engineering and trials and errors to make it work - so too we look at veritas, hock, IBC, etc. and know before we go very far each of them is going to act differently...

Many moons ago, as part of our Engineering degree we did metallurgy, and for practical we analysed different steel samples in the laboratory:

Chemical analysis (latest standard = GDS), tensile properties (now ASTM E8), and hardness (ASTM18), among others. There were also various metal certification standards, based on performance requirements. For my job we sometimes send steel samples out for analysis when we have excess corrosion, wear, or failures. In some cases we found excessive corrosion on new vessels made from low carbon steel, compared to the same vessels manufactured by the same company 40 years ago. The analysis showed that simple imported carbon steel was very different to that used in the old days.

Could make a nice magazine article, to select various woodworking tools and have the steel analysed.

 

[Mike Davis]

I wonder if the difference is due to massive recycling today versus the virgin material available years ago?

 

[Hmerkle]

I wonder if the difference is due to massive recycling today versus the virgin material available years ago?

Great thought Mike!
I know people talk about steel impurities - that is why some of the crucible tool steel is so desirable because you have to be REALLY careful in powdered metal how much impurity is there or it doesn't sinter properly!

 

[Mark Gottesman]

Micro amounts of elements can and will affect a final product. It is thought that some of the famous steels of yore died out due to them being pockets of materials with a particular assay that has disappeared. That ,along with primitive smelting, forming and heat treating methods lead to some real puzzlers in the blade world. What is now called Damascus steel is really a laminated material that achieves it pattern through stacking cutting and multiple folds. It yields a special looking piece, allows high and low carbon steels to be mixed and yields a product that has a lot of good properties. It is , however, very time and resource intensive. The original damascus steel gained that name due it first being noticed in the trade markets of Damascus, Syria. It was a steel with a pattern, often called "watered" that was a high carbon steel produced in a crucible. The pattern came from the way the steel charged crucible melted and cooled. The cycle produced a steel with an internal crystalline pattern that could be preserved during the a very specific forging cycle.

Besides the composition a major component is the heat treatment. It must be done under tight controls and process conditions to achieve an end product that can deliver its' full potential. Very often commercial blades are done in huge batches and the results can be variable from the inside to the outside of the batch.

A simple carbon steel like the 10xx or 51xx series properly heat-treated will outperform a high tech steel with a mediocre heat treat.

Some people have already done these sort of tests.
http://bladetest.infillplane.com/index.html

http://www3.telus.net/BrentBeach/Sharpen/index.html

So, blademaking is fascinating stuff, but my solution is to find a blade that works well, and sharpen as needed.

PS: In looking at the above web sites there is mention of a micro back-bevel. Anyone using this?

 

[smallboat]

Willem- I too did metallurgy as an engineering student in the dark ages(mine is really rusty) and, like you, was thinking an objective comparison would make for an interesting read.

Mark- thanks for the links, wish fulfilled. I'll take a look

One part I do recall relates to the importance of heat treating. We ran various samples through heat cycles and compared the crystalline structure under the microscope.
I can see where process control in manufacturing could be at least as important as a simple ingredient list.

 

[Hmerkle]

Thank you to Mark and Steve,
I looked at Mark's links (not thoroughly of course) but it reinforced my idea, that improvements have been incremental.
Thicker blades, 01 tool steel, A2 etc.
They do what the manufacturer's say, but what I am thinking about is not an incremental step, but a leap.

Back in the late 80's and early 90's we started using crucible tool steel in production metal turning.
It was a leap - better than what we were doing including some of the carbide we were using at the time!

crucible is a manufacturer of powdered metal material in different shapes.
I don't think anyone was using it for wood tools at the time.

This article form Fine woodworking suggests that 2012 was the first time PM was applied to wood working tools...
https://www.finewoodworking.com/tool-guide/product-finder/veritas-pm-v11-tool-steel.aspx

Anyway back to my point - thank you both for making me look for "What is different?"

I wanted to see a "Novel change" not just an incremental change. (better edge holding, better wear properties etc.)

I think the novel change is powdered metal...

Mike Davis was raving about his Veritas plane blade - and I just assumed it was another thick replacement blade like the Hock, IBC or Pinnacle.

It's not - the Veritas is POWDERED METAL!
Is this the novel change?
I am not sure, but ask Mike - as he points out he sees it as different!

 

[Mike Davis]

The PM-V11 Story

At Veritas Tools, we design from scratch. Each product we develop involves the consideration of new concepts, new materials, and new manufacturing processes. We want the tools we design to be innovative and provide excellent value for our customers.

Woodworkers have long searched for the acme of tool steels. Often a topic of lively debate, there is a wide variety of tool steels to choose from – a veritable alphabet soup of letters and numbers of which M2, O1, M4, CPM-3V, A2, and D2 are just a few.

Our goal was to find a steel for the next generation of Veritas manufactured cutting tools that would not only deliver excellent performance over a range of applications, but would add value for amateur and professional woodworkers alike.

We started with a long list of candidates and narrowed them down to 21 steels/heat treatment combinations. Each of these combinations was then extensively tested for:

edge retention

impact resistance

ease and speed of sharpening

As different applications may require different bevel angles, the tests (for all 21 metals) were repeated with blade bevel angles of 20°, 25°, 30° and 35°. To ensure that the observations were not skewed by atypical samples, each test was repeated with multiple blades. Many months of testing generated an extensive set of data for analysis.

Some interesting facts from our testing:

We took over 5600 digital microscope photos to measure and evaluate blade performance

We created wood shavings that, if connected end to end, would stretch 1.6 miles (2.6 km)

We chopped through a total of 10 feet (3 metres) of oak

We ground the equivalent of two complete plane blades to dust

Our engineers got cut only once!

The Winner

Once the analyses were complete, one metal emerged as the clear winner: PM-V11.

The PM-V11 alloy was the most durable metal tested on the impact test, and finished a close second on our wear testing. Of critical importance to us (and to you) is that blades made from the PM-V11 alloy can be sharpened with common abrasive media such as water stones. It takes a bit longer than O1, but PM-V11 blades sharpen slightly faster than A2.

Details of our testing are available in the Test section of this website.

The graph below is a radar chart presenting the results of the tests for four of the blades we tested. Each axis shows the results of our tests on a 0-10 scale, with 0 at the centre, representing lowest performance, and 10 at the vertex, representing best performance. The PM-V11 alloy performance envelope clearly encompasses the best attributes of multiple steels.



About the PM-V11 Alloy and Powdered Metals

PM-V11 is a powdered metal (PM) alloy. To form a PM alloy, constituent metals are melted and mixed together, then atomized, creating very small particles that cool and harden, forming a powder. This powder is screened to ensure consistent particle size, and then heated under pressure to form a billet. The billet is then rolled to the required thickness, ready to process as a conventionally smelted steel would be. The PM process yields a steel with a very fine grain structure that is uniform throughout.

So how do PM-V11 blades perform?

When we gave test blades to a group of woodworkers, the feedback was uniformly positive (bordering on ecstatic in some cases). They reported that in day-to-day use PM-V11 blades readily sharpened to a keen edge that cut cleanly and remained sharp for much longer than O1 or A2 steel blades. They didn’t need a scanning electron microscope or an advanced degree in metallurgy to know this was simply a better blade material.

 

[Hmerkle]

When we gave test blades to a group of woodworkers, the feedback was uniformly positive (bordering on ecstatic in some cases).

That was Mike - I am not sure how to tell an ecstatic Mike Davis from an at calm Mike Davis, but that simply proves those guys at Veritas are SUPER SMART!":rotflm:

 

[Mike Davis]

I am not sure how to tell an ecstatic Mike Davis from a calm Mike Davis:rotflm:

There is no difference.

 

[StephenK]

"Our engineers got cut only once!"

That's not a bad claim. Safety gurus would frown, though