Yep, apart from very select grades of materials for special applications, all steel has some recycled steel added early in the process.The Mastiff wrote: ↑Wed Jun 05, 2019 4:58 pmI'm not entirely sure about powder steels but there are very few non recycled ingot steels. I can only think of a couple used in knives like some of Hitachi's. White steel? Maybe. Most every steel manufacturer uses recycled steel to some degree. Some blend recycled with new steel made from ore. Isn't steel the most recycled product of all?
I'd be out if Aluminum is used. I hate it on knife handles.
Typically it's about 20-25% recycled.....But my point was to go for as-close-to-100% recycled as possible- to show it is possible.
Looks like I was right and the handle scale material seems to be the most straightforward.
The comments about upcycling of old materials (as opposed to recycled materials) made me think: A lot of proper hand-made kurkris use Mercedes truck leaf springs as barstock in Nepal.....The challenge would be finding enough good non-degraded material to select to make the usual 600-1200 sprint run (including a sensible amount of QC drop outs)
Something like that might be very interesting as a special sprint run of carbon steel.