Thanks a lot Shawn, some really interesting results. I completely agree, MC deserves to be HTed to higher hardness - at leas for pocket knives.
One point (a thought, really) about that 'better initial sharpness holding' for low alloy steels:
I can not really attest to it, but my impression is that it mainly comes from the world of Japanese and western custom kitchen knives - and there the situation is a lot different to what we see in pocket knives in the past few years. First of all - it is different companies with different technical background who make the knives (from very traditional methods where HT is done by eye to sophisticated automatized HT processes by others). Also - with exception of few outliers (like yourself
) high alloy steels are not really used much for these knives. For a very long time it was basically only simple carbon steels being used like white or blue 1/2/super for the large part the grind and sharpening were over time implicitly fine tuned to the properties of these steels and the use of these knives. Later industrial production arrived and more and more different stainless steels entered the market - and these were not always HTed properly. The best example would be VG-10 which never really took off among enthusiast users, because the knives that were widely available (mainly by Shun) had issues with chipping (my personal experience too).
On top of the different steel/grind 'landscape', the medium being cut in the kitchen is on average a whole lot less abrasive and aggressive to the edge then a manila rope, cardboard, or a zip-tie. And I am wondering whether this could yield to slightly different edge dulling processes where the edge of the low alloyed steels fares better.
Last but not least - one often hears how stainless steels in kitchen knives don't react to higher grit stones (say above 3k, give or take) as the simple carbon steel knives do - let alone to very fine natural sharpening stones. How much of that is just an objective fact that stainless steels have different carbides in them and how much is the sharpening itself (where most users have tuned their process to carbon steel knives) is not simple to disentangle, but may well contribute to this 'better initial sharpness holding' conundrum.
Again, just a though. Thanks again for your work.