Neither of those steels will hold a fine push cutting edge well, they are not designed for it. CTS-XHP is clearly marketed by the manufacturer as a stainless version of D2, so consider it to be a more stain resistant version of CPM-D2 (which is near identical in behavior to D2 for the user but has significant advantages to the manufacturer for grindability, ease of response to HT and marketing leverage).ljg wrote: But S30V will loose it's fine push cutting edge quicker, but will continue with a toothy slicing edge for longer.
If I want to have a a push cutting knife, get the CTS-XHP.
The largest difference is that the wear resistance in XHP will come from chromium carbides whereas in S30V is comes from the vanadium carbides. In general (very general) S30V is a more optimal composition because minimizing carbide size/volume by maximizing hardness of the carbides (vanadium carbide is much harder than chromium carbide) gives a higher toughness at a given wear resistance.
However it has to be kept in mind that these changes are not huge, they are like the changes that olympic athletes make in their training. This doesn't enable a 100 m sprinter to take a second off of his run, however he might be able to gain a tenth of a second and this easily could move him into medal contention.
If you want to see significant differences in use without very careful controlled comparisons you would need to contrast very different materials like for example CTS-XHP vs CTS-BD1. Most people would likely report differences in those steels because in some respects the differences between those steels can be 2:1.
I think the only likely difference you would see in CTS-XHP vs S30V is that if you use softer and more natural hones you would find CTS-XHP easier to grind/sharpen as those stones do not work well on high vanadium steels as they over stress the edge easily as they can't cut the vanadium carbides so instead the carbides just wear and are torn out of S30V which could feel slippery on those types of stones.
Yes, chromium forms larger carbides than vanadium this is because it forms a different type of carbide and forms larger aggregates (piles of carbides coming together). This is why if you look at sections of steels like D2 and 440C which are very high chromium carbide the carbides are actually macroscopic in size (the human eye can resolve objects in the range of 20 to 40 microns).Cliff, are you saying that CTS-XHP has larger carbides?
The carbide volumes of both steels is very high so neither are suitable for very low angles and will take brittle failure. In regards to which one is more capable the difference is so small material property wise it would be dominated by which blade had the more optimal hardening or even which blade had the more optimal sharpening.Does this mean that I can't take it to as acute edge as S30V (as per your video showing how large carbides prevent acute angles)?
Wouldn't this imply that S30V at more acute angles should push cut better?
