Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

Discuss Spyderco's products and history.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#81

Post by jpm2 »

Everyone here seems to be focused on co-59 turning into co-60, when the more likely threat is already existing co-60 getting into the wild and processed into an end product the public is exposed to every day.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#82

Post by 500Nitro »

I have more important things to worry about.

All post July 1945 has small amounts of trace radioactivity in it.w about a Spyderco sponsored

Maybe Sal/Spyderco should do a Sprint run of knives in low background steel lol, would hate to think of the price!
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#83

Post by jpm2 »

500Nitro wrote:
Tue Nov 20, 2018 12:52 pm
I have more important things to worry about.
I'm sure we all do, just pointing out the possibility is a lot easier than you think.

Not sure what the rest of your post means.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#84

Post by demoncase »

cbrstar wrote:
Tue Nov 20, 2018 11:17 am
OP, just think about this lead is something like 1 atom from being gold. Out in the wild lead turning into gold is impossible. But it has happened in a nuclear reactor.

Like others pointed out it's impossible for it to pick up that other atom outside a reactor.

But its not a bad question. We've taken all sorts of things for granted over the last century that turned out to be toxic.
Sub-atomic particles- not atoms.

You need a protons and neutrons added to the nucleus of a lead 79 atom (and the balancing amount of electrons in the orbiting shells) to turn lead into gold 82 atom

An atom is the smallest single amount of an element- it's the arrangement of the subatomic particles within each atom that create the differences between elements.
Warhammer 40000 is- basically- Lord Of The Rings on a cocktail of every drug known to man and genuine lunar dust, stuck in a blender with Alien, Mechwarrior, Dune, Starship Troopers, Fahrenheit 451 and Star Wars, bathed in blood, turned up to eleventy billion, set on fire, and catapulted off into space screaming "WAAAGH!" and waving a chainsaw sword- without the happy ending.

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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#85

Post by demoncase »

500Nitro wrote:
Tue Nov 20, 2018 12:52 pm
I have more important things to worry about.

All post July 1945 has small amounts of trace radioactivity in it.w about a Spyderco sponsored

Maybe Sal/Spyderco should do a Sprint run of knives in low background steel lol, would hate to think of the price!
We used to take pieces of steel from the ships sunk at Scapa Flow in WW1 and use them in various bits of high-accuracy kit that needed steel with lower-than-current-Post-Nuclear-Age background levels.

I think Nasa did use a fair bit of it for various cosmic ray detector type things

That said- for the person outside of a well calibrated laboratory environment- we aren't going to tell the difference.
Warhammer 40000 is- basically- Lord Of The Rings on a cocktail of every drug known to man and genuine lunar dust, stuck in a blender with Alien, Mechwarrior, Dune, Starship Troopers, Fahrenheit 451 and Star Wars, bathed in blood, turned up to eleventy billion, set on fire, and catapulted off into space screaming "WAAAGH!" and waving a chainsaw sword- without the happy ending.

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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#86

Post by 500Nitro »

Yep, the German ships at Scarpa flow is THE worlds major source. Probably the only major source of no background steel.

Something good came out of WW1 lol

Spot on with everything else as well.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#87

Post by jpm2 »

There are millions of thickness, level, and density radiation sources in use worldwide, many are probably co-60.
I've worked on a lot of these through the years, none in labs.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#88

Post by ZrowsN1s »

SpyderEdgeForever wrote:
Mon Nov 19, 2018 10:05 pm
.... I guess I should just leave this forum.....
No way man. You keep this place interesting :D Wouldn't be the same without you.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#89

Post by DougC-3 »

demoncase wrote:
Tue Nov 20, 2018 3:02 pm
500Nitro wrote:
Tue Nov 20, 2018 12:52 pm
I have more important things to worry about.

All post July 1945 has small amounts of trace radioactivity in it.w about a Spyderco sponsored

Maybe Sal/Spyderco should do a Sprint run of knives in low background steel lol, would hate to think of the price!
We used to take pieces of steel from the ships sunk at Scapa Flow in WW1 and use them in various bits of high-accuracy kit that needed steel with lower-than-current-Post-Nuclear-Age background levels.

I think Nasa did use a fair bit of it for various cosmic ray detector type things

That said- for the person outside of a well calibrated laboratory environment- we aren't going to tell the difference.
Well, this is one valuable (to me) thing I've learned from this thread, and as for our friend SpyderEdgeForever, it takes all kinds of people to make the world (and apparently this forum ;) ) and as one of my friends put it, "all kinds of makes to people the world" :p
,
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#90

Post by lonerider1013 »

500Nitro wrote:
Sat Nov 17, 2018 1:00 am
Who's got San old watch from the 70's/80's with glow in the dark hands.

Don't stick it next to a Geiger counter, some make them tell you it's not good to wear them.

Forgotten what the name of the stuff is.
Originally they used radium. By the 70s/80s it was tritium.
Many brands now use something called superluminova or similar, not sure what it is.
If you look on old watches where it says "swiss made" on the dial there are often what looks like a "T" before and after, bracketing it. The t stands for tritium.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#91

Post by Doc Dan »

SpyderEdgeForever wrote:
Mon Nov 19, 2018 10:05 pm
zhyla wrote:
Mon Nov 19, 2018 8:35 am
Bloke wrote:
Sun Nov 18, 2018 7:32 pm
Perhaps I could have worded my last post a little better but I think you all know what I’m getting at.
I don’t have any issue with your words. And I don’t disagree, SEF seems like an amicable guy. The implication, if I took it correctly, was that I’m being rude by summarizing his threads as nonsense. I appreciate that this forum is consistently a polite place to talk about knives. But I think we are doing him a disservice by nodding along with this stuff. He really wants to contribute good ideas (I think) but in my opinion needs a reality check on how to go about that.

So SEF, if you’re reading any of this, I would suggest you try to do more research and be more skeptical about your topics before unleashing then here. You want to have content people don’t write off immediately, right? In this case you should have found out that VG-10 is a standard steel in kitchen knives and questioned the validity of your hypothesis. It’s also worth remembering that if you don’t have a good understanding about chemistry you’ll be prone to wrong conclusions about “chemicals”.

Doc Dan wrote:
Sun Nov 18, 2018 11:42 pm
See, I think people like SEF are important. He actually asks the question "what if". People like this are needful, otherwise people the opposite of that would have us all living in caves or mud huts because unless we ask such questions, we never progress.
Doc, I get where you’re coming from, but this is basically false. Progress is historically made by doers with knowledge. Surf Gringo doesn’t have a collaboration because he posted enough what-ifs here, but because he has working knowledge that is useful.

The “sharks with lasers” approach to innovation doesn’t move anything forward.


I totally understand where you are coming from on this and I see when I am unwanted and not appreciated. I guess I should just leave this forum altogether and never come back, because, after all, the threads and posts I have made are trouble-making and off the wall and have no basis in reality, is that what you are saying? I know when I am hated and unwanted. Thank you for being straight forward to me with your thoughts. I appreciate that greatly.
You better not leave. Don't worry about people that do not have the vision or the inquisitive mind that you do. Most of us, here, like your posts.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#92

Post by Woodpuppy »

This thread gave me some topics to read up on, so from that perspective I found it valuable. Questions asked can yield learning if you’re willing. SEF, I hope your fears are put to rest on this topic.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#93

Post by JD Spydo »

I've been giving this thread some consideration because it does raise some issues we should be aware of. And that is the toxicity properties of certain metals. With our new Spyder Brother "LARRIN" this would be a good question to pick his brain with. Because with his obvious deep knowledge on metallurgy I bet he could set up a chart of metals that have potential toxic properties in them>> even if they are very minor in toxicity it's still something to be aware of especially when working with food.

Because for decades the dental industry had tried to tell us that there was no danger nor was there any toxic properties in the older "silver/mercury amalgam filings that literally millions of people had dentists put in their tooth cavities before these newer ceramic and synthetic materials made it obsolete. Yeah I most definitely think we were lied to big time on that one issue especially and we have no way of knowing what kinds of cancer and other health problems that might have resulted as well as brain disorders from those older silver/mercury amalgam tooth filings. Because mercury I know for a fact can and does create brain function problems. And over the years ( 1940s to the 1990s) we had a literal explosion of mental/brain afflictions like "ADD" and "ADHD" as well as several other behavior disorders being almost epidemic in the USA for those decades to me is not a coincidence.

I doubt if metal toxicity is much of a factor that is directly a concern in knife blades per se >> but it's not a bad idea to be aware of what is potentially toxic or hazardous IMO.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#94

Post by demoncase »

JD Spydo wrote:
Wed Nov 21, 2018 8:38 pm
I've been giving this thread some consideration because it does raise some issues we should be aware of. And that is the toxicity properties of certain metals. With our new Spyder Brother "LARRIN" this would be a good question to pick his brain with. Because with his obvious deep knowledge on metallurgy I bet he could set up a chart of metals that have potential toxic properties in them>> even if they are very minor in toxicity it's still something to be aware of especially when working with food.

Because for decades the dental industry had tried to tell us that there was no danger nor was there any toxic properties in the older "silver/mercury amalgam filings that literally millions of people had dentists put in their tooth cavities before these newer ceramic and synthetic materials made it obsolete. Yeah I most definitely think we were lied to big time on that one issue especially and we have no way of knowing what kinds of cancer and other health problems that might have resulted as well as brain disorders from those older silver/mercury amalgam tooth filings. Because mercury I know for a fact can and does create brain function problems. And over the years ( 1940s to the 1990s) we had a literal explosion of mental/brain afflictions like "ADD" and "ADHD" as well as several other behavior disorders being almost epidemic in the USA for those decades to me is not a coincidence.

I doubt if metal toxicity is much of a factor that is directly a concern in knife blades per se >> but it's not a bad idea to be aware of what is potentially toxic or hazardous IMO.
Have a care about conflating correlation with causation.

Is the increase in ADD and ADHD diagnosis due to some external factor (Like filling metal leachate) or is it down to better (and broader) understanding of how to diagnose such disorders and detection rates?

Over the same period, there has been a measurable reduction in inner city violence in the West- several studies are suggesting this is linked to the banning of lead in fuel. There were studies that showed kids exposed to lead had higher aggression rates.....or could it be due to the build of mercury from fillings?

Without some really carefully done double-blind trials, it would be difficult to separate the many causes that drive an observed change

Especially I can recall being a kid in the 80s and there was no concept of ADD or ADHD in UK education.....There were 'naughty kids' and 'remedial kids' and then everyone else. 'Naughty kids' got put into the slow lane with the remedial kids.

Fun Example: You can plot a fair clear correlation between:
1. the Divorce Rate in Maine vs the average per capita consumption of Margarine
2. The number of Nicholas Cage movies released vs the number of accidental pool drownings per annum
( graphs for the above- http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations )

I'd also point out that amalgam fillings didn't get replaced due to material superiority of the newer materials or safety concerns- but they are broadly out of favour in the US due to their aesthetic appearance. That's not the case globally.

I have recently had a replacement filling in the UK of metal amalagam because the ceramic one failed.

I am not worried about the minute mercury content making me measureably odder as my life goes on :D
Warhammer 40000 is- basically- Lord Of The Rings on a cocktail of every drug known to man and genuine lunar dust, stuck in a blender with Alien, Mechwarrior, Dune, Starship Troopers, Fahrenheit 451 and Star Wars, bathed in blood, turned up to eleventy billion, set on fire, and catapulted off into space screaming "WAAAGH!" and waving a chainsaw sword- without the happy ending.

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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#95

Post by SpyderEdgeForever »

Thank you! That settles it: I am staying as long as I can, hopefully. I love this forum and I really admire and respect you all on it and the great discussions we have. I respect a person's right to their views and I accept understandable criticism if needed. Also, thank you: Yes my fears are settled on the issue of cobalt transmutation. As some others pointed out, care does have to be taken by steel producers to make sure the batch of material they are using does not get contaminated by already-existent materials with toxic effects to biology. Doc, and others, I am honored. I don't know how to put into words how glad I am that you appreciate me here.

JD and demoncase: Without wanting to get this off topic, the issue of metal fillings is another one that I was thinking of. You see, the metal amalgam seem to have the upside that , because they are metal, they are less-prone to fracturing-type of failures, than the ceramic. But, I have read and heard claims of toxicity of the metal. In short, can a person with metal fillings have a good degree of confidence that they will not get any major negative effects in their body over time due to metal leaching into the blood stream? I ask because I had to get fillings and I chose the metal-amalgam over the ceramic. The dentist gave me the choice and said "The ceramic is often chosen more because it has better cosmetic-appearance but the amalgam metal is probably more durable over time." I went with metal over ceramic. Interesting for someone like me who is always looking for the latest advances in ceramics for knives, eh? :)
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#96

Post by Tucson Tom »

SpyderEdgeForever wrote:
Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:54 pm
Thank you! That settles it: I am staying as long as I can, hopefully.
I'm glad to hear that. I was getting alarmed seeing you considering leaving the forum. There is nothing at all wrong with asking questions and expressing your opinions. I have had my hide burned online a few times and it is a way to learn (maybe not a great way or fun way). It is certainly no fun when people dogpile on something you say, wrong or otherwise.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#97

Post by Bloke »

SpyderEdgeForever wrote:
Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:54 pm
That settles it:
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#98

Post by anagarika »

SEF,

I think metal filings (as result of sharpening) isn’t fine enough to be absorbed by skin.
Chris :spyder:
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#99

Post by samdasnake »

anagarika wrote:
Fri Nov 23, 2018 7:08 am
SEF,

I think metal filings (as result of sharpening) isn’t fine enough to be absorbed by skin.
I think he was talking about metal fillings in your teeth (i.e. silver mercury amalgam), not metal filings fromknife sharpening.
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Re: Reality-Check please: Are our VG10 Knives slowly poisoning us?

#100

Post by DougC-3 »

Tucson Tom wrote:
Fri Nov 23, 2018 1:43 am
SpyderEdgeForever wrote:
Thu Nov 22, 2018 9:54 pm
Thank you! That settles it: I am staying as long as I can, hopefully.
I'm glad to hear that. I was getting alarmed seeing you considering leaving the forum. There is nothing at all wrong with asking questions and expressing your opinions. I have had my hide burned online a few times and it is a way to learn (maybe not a great way or fun way). It is certainly no fun when people dogpile on something you say, wrong or otherwise.
Yeah, I've been burned a time or two as well, about my lack of metallurgical knowledge. I just replied that that was one reason I was hanging out on this forum -- to learn about stuff like that (Ironically, my brother was a metallurgist.)

And I might point out that SEF said in the topic title that he was asking for a "Reality Check."
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