I found this posted on another hunting forum.
Quote:
"Author: Joe Talmadge
Table of Contents:
I. What makes a steel perform?
A. Introduction
B. Sharpen for performance
C. Design for performance
D. Properties of performance steels
E. What's the "best steel"?
II. Elements of Steel
III. Steels
A. Non-stainless Steels
B. Stainless Steels
C. Damascus Steel
C. Non-steel used for cutlery
IV. Selected URLs for steel information
V. Bibliography
I. What Makes A Steel Perform?
A. Introduction
Steel is the heart of the blade. The search for higher-performance steels has to a number of wonderful materials in recent years. Steel by itself isn't the sole determiner of knife performance, of course. Heat treatment, blade geometry, handle geometry and materials all effect how a knife performs for a particular job. However, those other qualities can be difficult to measure. You can't tell by looking at it how well a blade has been heat-treated, and you can only make educated guesses on how well the blade and handle geometry will work. With steel, however, you can get a full listing of its alloying elements, something measurable and somehow satisfying.
As a result, it's easy to fall into the trap of putting too much emphasis on the steel itself. A knife is more than steel, and it's important not to forget that. In addition, many modern steels perform so well, that knife decisions can often be made based on other factors than marginal increases in steel performance.
The question of "what's the best steel" or "rank the following steels in order from best to worst" often comes up. The resulting replies can never be totally accurate, because depending on the jobs the knife will be used for, the blade geometry, and the quality of the heat treat, what is "best" and what is "worst" can be very fluid. If you want to make an educated decision about steels, try to learn the basics of steel properties, and go from there.
B. Sharpening for performance
That doesn't mean that significant performance advantages can't be had by choosing the right steel for the job. In fact, choosing a steel can significantly impact the performance of a knife. But, to really bring out the performance of a particular steel, you need to take advantage of the better steel in your sharpening plan. If a weak, brittle steel can perform the job when sharpened at 25-degrees-per-side, a strong, tough steel might give you some marginal performance improvements if it, too, is sharpened at 25-degrees-per-side. However, to really bring out the performance of the better steel, trying bringing it down to 20-degrees per side, or less. The advantage of the better steel is that it is strong and tough enough to hold up with a small edge angle -- and smaller edge angles radically out-perform bigger edge angles. It's easy to get a 10-to-1 perform advantage for certain cutting jobs by cutting 5 degrees off your sharpening angle.
This leads to the general rule:
To really see the advantages of a better steel, exploit that steel in your sharpening program. If you're going to sharpen all your knives at the same angle regardless of steel, you might de-emphasize steel choice somewhat.
On the internet, I'll often see someone posting about wanting to upgrade from their ATS-34 folder to one that has S30V, and then in a different post, declare that they sharpen all their knives at 20-degrees-per-side. Why spend all that extra money for S30V, just to get some marginal wear resistance advantages but no other performance advantages? If that same user would take advantage of S30V's superior toughness and drop the edge angle to 15-degrees-per-side, they would see a large leap in cutting performance, along with the extra wear resistance. Because of choosing the right sharpening angle, the more expensive S30V knife now gives an impressive return on investment. *Now* you can see what all the fuss is about!
C. Design for performance
In the section above, we highlighted what the user can do to bring out the best performance in a high-performance steel. But the user is only half the equation; now we will look at what the knifemaker might do with a higher- performance steel. As the knifemaker moves from one steel to another, it is often possible to modify the design of a particular knife to take advantage of the newer steel, and raise performance.
For example, it is possible to make a hard-use tactical/utility knife from ATS-34. To make sure the ATS-34 will take the kind of stresses it might see in this environment, the edge might be left a bit thick (sacrificing cutting performance), or the hardness brought down a touch (sacrificing strength and wear resistance), or both. If the same maker moves to much-tougher S30V, he might be able to thin out the edge, thin out the entire knife, and raise the hardness, bringing up performance as a whole. Moving to differentially-tempered 5160 might allow the maker to re-profile even more for performance. If we're talking about a fighter, moving from 1095 to 3V might allow the maker to make the knife much thinner, lighter, and faster, while significantly increasing cutting performance and maintaining edge integrity.
So to really take advantage of the higher-performance steel, we want the knifemaker to adjust the knife design to the steel, wherever he thinks it's appropriate. If a knifemaker offers the same knife in multiple steels, ask about what the characteristics are in each steel, and the how's and why's of where the design has changed to accommodate each steel offered.
Note that there can be good reasons that a knifemaker might not change the blade profile even though the steel has changed. Maybe he's particularly good at heat-treating one steel or another, so that the differences between disparate steels are minimized. Maybe the higher-performance steel is not available in the next stock thickness down. Maybe instead of higher cutting performance, the maker would rather offer the same cutting performance but in a knife that can take more abuse. Maybe his customers tend to only buy thicker knives regardless of performance.
So work with the maker to understand the choices being made with the different steels being offered. If you understand the kind of performance you need, you'll be able to make a wise choice.
D. Properties of performance steels
What is it we're looking for in a steel, anyway? Well, what we are looking for is strength, toughness, wear resistance, and edge holding. Sometimes, we're also looking for stain resistance.