HRC Database

[Wowbagger]

Strange thread.

sal

Well what else is there to do ?
You've already given us the world's hardest knives !
60 is Play Dough . Right ?

Well actually :
I modded / shortened another knife a week ago now . . . basic old Case CV . . . I had cut almost all of the blade thickness clear through using an abrasive wheel just leaving the least thickness at the ends of the slot right at the edge and another little thin bit at the spine . . . almost nothing . At this point I like to break off the cut off .

I was pleased to find It was springy , I flexed it over a few degrees and it came right back ; when I did break if off it went "ting".
Decently heat treated !

Has been holding up with a very acute edge for a week of cutting through various kinds of masking tape like tape on closed cell foam tubes around machine parts I have been unboxing on again off again at work . Edge still scrape arm hair shave sharp and bites the back of my thumb nail with enthusiasm .

There . That's my contribution to the knife hardness thread . On the scale it equals : Quite Good .

Like this one but not this funny stainless steel stuff (old image stolen from one of my ancient posts in another forum) .
The one I modded was black scales , CV alloy and nice dark blue patina . I put ovals of black , rough rubber , gun grip tape up at the pivot end of the handle , jimmped the spine of the handle near the pivot with slots all the way across ; Spay blade removed on latest knife (I found spay doesn't have enough negative edge angle for my intended use ) and just gets in the way of grip if left in the handle as a second blade.
Yessss I know : "Congratulations ! You have reinvented the box knife ." But they please me .

PS: imagine if you will the same deal done on a brand new Para 3 Cobalt Blue G-10 SPY 27 .
Brilliant knife (box knife) . . . she takes care of the hard jobs ! ! !
Love that handle and negative blade angle ! ! !
and I didn't have to texture or jimp anything .
Try it !

[Steelearner]

It's a link to a database with a good explanation of the process and what it means, including conclusions not to be drawn from a value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spyderco/s/KNwbqzvjOh

[JNewell]

Info on the GB 1 folder, originally from Sal via BF. I'm not aware that Sal ever made any further comments on the GB 1 folder hardness targets or yields, but I could have missed something. The BF link no longer works but Sal's original post should turn up if searched.

Here's what Sal posted on that:

Our plan was about 62/63. Gayle Tested one and he said it was closer to 65. CPM-M4 can take the higer hardness if that's so. We'll be doing a sample testing next week.

sal

[Red Leader]

It's a link to a database with a good explanation of the process and what it means, including conclusions not to be drawn from a value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spyderco/s/KNwbqzvjOh

Thanks for posting this. This was the user that was posting all the fascinating results. And from your link, it looks like he is culminating all his and @Skylark427 's finding into a spreadsheet, which includes a lot of Spydercos and other brand. Thank you guys for doing this.

Speaking of which...looking at the Protech results, sure look like they are doing it right as well!

[Paul Ardbeg]

As already posted here, there is a user on Reddit sharing test results. He just released the results for Magnamax Mule.

I'm sure someone with more knowledge about hardness testing is on the forum and might want to comment

[Red Leader]

Bad to the bone...

https://altgpt.neocities.org/SteelHardnessLab

[Skylark427]

It's a link to a database with a good explanation of the process and what it means, including conclusions not to be drawn from a value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spyderco/s/KNwbqzvjOh

Thanks for posting this. This was the user that was posting all the fascinating results. And from your link, it looks like he is culminating all his and @Skylark427 's finding into a spreadsheet, which includes a lot of Spydercos and other brand. Thank you guys for doing this.

Speaking of which...looking at the Protech results, sure look like they are doing it right as well!

I was somewhat waiting for the right time to come here and announce this .

The website thing was a complete surprise for both of us. We were just contacted by a very kind individual that decided to make our random spreadsheets as an actual website for us.

I was planning on coming here with some sort of spreadsheet on just the Spyderco results, but you guys have already found everything, so hopefully this gets some good information out there on the ranges of everything. Still waiting on a few knives, a few more results got listed today.

I'm glad you guys like this and happy to contribute to this community

I've made notes on several blades tested, a bit too much info to get into here, but I explained a lot in the Reddit posts. If anyone has questions, feel free to ask, the machines I use are the Mitutoyo HR-320MS and Starrett Digital Twin 3832, Taylor uses a Mitutoyo HR-530 for his results.

Anyway, the main website of the results:

https://altgpt.neocities.org/SteelHardnessLab

@Paul Ardbeg and everyone else I guess:

On the MagnaMax Mule, we have 3 tested so far, one at 64.4Rc, one at 65.1Rc, one at 65.6Rc. I have a third on the way but it looks like these prototype batches of the steel used for the Mule targeted 64.5-65.5Rc. I'll know a bit more when my third one arrives, but so far that steel has been performing amazingly.

[Red Leader]

It's a link to a database with a good explanation of the process and what it means, including conclusions not to be drawn from a value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spyderco/s/KNwbqzvjOh

Thanks for posting this. This was the user that was posting all the fascinating results. And from your link, it looks like he is culminating all his and @Skylark427 's finding into a spreadsheet, which includes a lot of Spydercos and other brand. Thank you guys for doing this.

Speaking of which...looking at the Protech results, sure look like they are doing it right as well!

I was somewhat waiting for the right time to come here and announce this .

The website thing was a complete surprise for both of us. We were just contacted by a very kind individual that decided to make our random spreadsheets as an actual website for us.

I was planning on coming here with some sort of spreadsheet on just the Spyderco results, but you guys have already found everything, so hopefully this gets some good information out there on the ranges of everything. Still waiting on a few knives, a few more results got listed today.

I'm glad you guys like this and happy to contribute to this community

I've made notes on several blades tested, a bit too much info to get into here, but I explained a lot in the Reddit posts. If anyone has questions, feel free to ask, the machines I use are the Mitutoyo HR-320MS and Starrett Digital Twin 3832, Taylor uses a Mitutoyo HR-530 for his results.

Anyway, the main website of the results:

https://altgpt.neocities.org/SteelHardnessLab

@Paul Ardbeg and everyone else I guess:

On the MagnaMax Mule, we have 3 tested so far, one at 64.4Rc, one at 65.1Rc, one at 65.6Rc. I have a third on the way but it looks like these prototype batches of the steel used for the Mule targeted 64.5-65.5Rc. I'll know a bit more when my third one arrives, but so far that steel has been performing amazingly.

Really thankful for both of your contributions!

It was interesting to see the one Manix LW Magnacut at under 62. My main squeeze right now is the satin Magnacut PM2 Salt, love that knife! I sometimes wonder what it is hardened to, but it takes a strop beautifully, and I have no qualms about the treatment. I suppose the other thing with these results is that the lower it is (like w/ some of the Golden K390 stuff), the tougher it likely is as well, so its all tradeoffs. Sal's 'All good, just different' words of wisdom come to mind.

[Skylark427]

It's a link to a database with a good explanation of the process and what it means, including conclusions not to be drawn from a value.
https://www.reddit.com/r/spyderco/s/KNwbqzvjOh

Thanks for posting this. This was the user that was posting all the fascinating results. And from your link, it looks like he is culminating all his and @Skylark427 's finding into a spreadsheet, which includes a lot of Spydercos and other brand. Thank you guys for doing this.

Speaking of which...looking at the Protech results, sure look like they are doing it right as well!

I was somewhat waiting for the right time to come here and announce this .

The website thing was a complete surprise for both of us. We were just contacted by a very kind individual that decided to make our random spreadsheets as an actual website for us.

I was planning on coming here with some sort of spreadsheet on just the Spyderco results, but you guys have already found everything, so hopefully this gets some good information out there on the ranges of everything. Still waiting on a few knives, a few more results got listed today.

I'm glad you guys like this and happy to contribute to this community

I've made notes on several blades tested, a bit too much info to get into here, but I explained a lot in the Reddit posts. If anyone has questions, feel free to ask, the machines I use are the Mitutoyo HR-320MS and Starrett Digital Twin 3832, Taylor uses a Mitutoyo HR-530 for his results.

Anyway, the main website of the results:

https://altgpt.neocities.org/SteelHardnessLab

@Paul Ardbeg and everyone else I guess:

On the MagnaMax Mule, we have 3 tested so far, one at 64.4Rc, one at 65.1Rc, one at 65.6Rc. I have a third on the way but it looks like these prototype batches of the steel used for the Mule targeted 64.5-65.5Rc. I'll know a bit more when my third one arrives, but so far that steel has been performing amazingly.

Really thankful for both of your contributions!

It was interesting to see the one Manix LW Magnacut at under 62. My main squeeze right now is the satin Magnacut PM2 Salt, love that knife! I sometimes wonder what it is hardened to, but it takes a strop beautifully, and I have no qualms about the treatment. I suppose the other thing with these results is that the lower it is (like w/ some of the Golden K390 stuff), the tougher it likely is as well, so its all tradeoffs. Sal's 'All good, just different' words of wisdom come to mind.

We need a few more samples of Magnacut to really tell what is going on with that unfortunately, but it really isn't unheard of in the production knife world to have roughly a 2Rc difference between knives, as literally anything can slightly affect it(one blade got slightly hotter when austenitizing, one blade cooled slightly faster, one blade made it into cryo slightly faster ect.) So it's hard to say what's going on at this point. I'll say out of basically all of the production knives I've used at looked at under my goniometer, Spyderco is basically the only company using 4° primary bevels. Most companies use 12°-16° primary bevels, 3-4× higher than Spyderco is using, this geometry difference will make a huge difference (moreso than the steel itself) when comparing knives.

That's part of the reason Spyderco knives cut as well as they do, they inherently have less friction because of the low geometry of the primary bevel. It's basically at what most chef's knife's are at. When, as I said, most folding knives and small fixed blades made for EDC use are much higher.

We will know more as testing continues.

I'm happy to contribute to the community in a positive way! This just started as me randomly testing my own knives about a year and a half ago, until I discovered Spyderco about a year ago. As some of you may know, my original collection was stolen during the burglary of my house in 2019, with it was the a lot of sentimental knives in a lot of different steels me and my late wife collected and tested together. Spyderco now makes up more than half of my new collection, and the Mule platform is what I am using to continue where me and her left off on our testing(they have the widest variety of steels in amazing heat treatments it just seems natural). Spyderco definitely does an amazing job at both designing knives and optimizing them for cutting ability, and does amazing on the heat treatments.

Btw, most recent result from me yesterday was the CPM Rex T15 Mule, an amazing 67.18Rc!

The third MagnaMax Mule is on the way, I've also got a Z-Max (same as Rex 86) Mule that's about to be shipped to me for both cut testing and hardness testing that a good friend is willing to sell me.

I'm glad everyone is happy with the work we are doing, I didn't expect it to get quite this big, but here we are . I'm happy to be part of this great community and make some sort if meaningful contributions to it .

More testing is on the way

[Brock O Lee]

Respect @Skylark427!

[horzuff]

Great initiative, following with bated breath!

[Skylark427]

@Brock O Lee @horzuff Thanks guys!

So for the cut testing (controlled testing) if you're unfamiliar, as I'm not positive if I've described it here of not, me and my late wife used to use a wide variety of steels in customs that we had made to tge same geometry, often having to get them reground by someone to maintain that geometry to continue testing, as believe it or not, it takes a very long time to do controlled testing, especially doing it blind and doing a minimum of 3 runs, all at the same time seeing how low of geometry each steel will handle for a given hardness. We typically used 3/4" high density polyethylene rope and Kevlar rope as the main two materials for the 26° and 20° inclusive testing. These two materials seem to be a good middle ground(especially high density polyethylene) to where we aren't making thousands of cuts on something like manila rope or sisal rope.

We would run it over a quality scale with a silicone mat to prevent premature blunting, and once a certain amount of force was pucked up, the test was finished. On 1/2" high density polyethylene rope, we would then take the angles as low as they could go for a given steel, once the cuts no longer increased with the amount of force gained, the edge we deemed was no longer stable for the geometry. This is where steels like 10V, 15V, Vanadis 8, K390, and S125V really shined at 67Rc-68Rc for these steels, Rex 86 did surprisingly well too at low geometry. This is being done mainly to honor my late wife and the times we had doing this, but also to hopefully help the community.

So far I have the MagnaMax Mule at 65.1Rc, PMA11 Mule at 64.3Rc, T15 Mule at 67.18Rc, K294 Mule at 65.1Rc, and 15V Mule at 66.3Rc for these tests. It will take a bit, especially to gather everything for the testing(this literally took us 4 years with about 40 different knives), but I've already been practicing on the 15V Manix G10, which I may add the Manix platform to the testing as well because I have so many knives in that already




15V Manix G10 66Rc, thinned to 0.010"-0.011" behind the edge, 0.25 micron finish 26° inclusive.

For anyone interested in this testing, I can also share that here. As I will more hardness testing as it continues, but that website automatically updates with our testing to the Google file .

On Magnacut, our 3 knives tested in Spyderco models are 61.9Rc, 63.4Rc, and 63.6Rc, all on either the Manix LW or G10 Salt model. We plan on getting more to test for this specific steel to see exactly what to expect for an overall range. Hopefully more testing will clarify more on what hardness level is more common, as a side note, the G10 Magnacut one I own was manufactured about 6 months prior to the LW models according to the blade. Not sure if that adds to the variability, or if it's just scatter at this point. More will tell, and once my 3rd MagnaMax Mule gets here, we will have another data point on that steel as well, albeit, that is the prototype version, not the main version that is starting to appear on some brands.

Happy to be here and help guys

[Skylark427]

I will be testing a 3rd MagnaMax Mule today, for anyone interested. It's important to keep in mind these Mule's were made from the prototype version of MagnaMax from Crucible, heat 2 to be specific.