Why hasn't the west (outside of obscure niche custom knife makers) moved beyond X50CrMoV15 for kitchen cutlery?

>And then he said
Why hasn't the west moved beyond X50CrMoV15 for kitchen cutlery?

>acting dumb to avoid triggering roasties
ISHYGD

why can't I buy a knife made out of high speed tool steel?

I dunno, why is it? Are you in prison? Do your parents not let you use their credit card?

Would be heavy and hard to sharpen I guess.

I've never seen anywhere that sells them. I saw a utility knife made out of D2 once but no kitchen knives. I want to know what the cutting tools they use in industrial food production are made out of. the stuff they use to cut thousands of carrots and potatos a day in soup factories.

Google harder then, they're out there

HSTS is a novelty that has no real benefit for food

Soup factories don't need their knives to behave like drill bits because the cutting surface isn't subject to overheating like if you're drilling dry metal surfaces

Just get aogami super from a reputable maker if you want overkill

>Why hasn't the west (outside of obscure niche custom knife makers) moved beyond X50CrMoV15 for kitchen cutlery?
I can tell you the exact reason for that - it's because 99,9% of westerners are too retarded, too uneducated and too untrained to use a genuine high performance knife without ruining it instantly. I can't tell you the number of times I have caught my mother using her freshly sharpened (by me) IKEA knife to cut stuff on a glass or ceramic platter or on her granite countertop, which of course instantly ruins any real edge you can put even on those sledgehammer type knives. Put a real high high end knife in the hands of the average cook and he will have it ruined in a day and then attempt to return it, claiming it was defective. Any company would go broke with such customers.

I had roommates like this once

I bought a shitty beater knife for them and kept my real knives locked in my room

Very simply because the overwhelming majority of kitchen knife buyers in the West know absolutely nothing about knives or metallurgy and thus will buy whatever the minimum wage dumbfuck at housewares store shills.

The few people in the west who are interested in more high performance kitchen knives can easily be served by Japanese makers already producing larger volumes for the domestic market of similar knives, while Westerm makers simply can't move enough volume to justify it on a production basis.

If you want high performance kitchen knives in North America I suggest finding a custom maker with some familiarity with modern metallurgy and modern best practices in knife making. I know one custom maker in the US who does kitchen knives in 1095 at ~62 HRC with full grain size minimization techniques applied, if you are interested.

when your family and coworkers don't want to use your knife because "its too sharp"

You can, but there is no point in using HSS for a kitchen knife application.

Kitchen knives primarily wear by microscopically chipping and/or rolling at the apex from repeated contacts with the cutting board. Resistance to this type of wear is called apex stability and this property is maximized in relatively pure carbon steels (or stainless steels designed to mimic carbon steels) at high hardness.

The very carbide formers added to HSS to increase wear resistance would first of all be wasted in a kitchen application but also directly reduce achievable apex stability, and thus reduce edge retention in this type of application.

Aogami/Shirogami/Aogami Super/1084/1095/O-1/52100/AEB-L/LC200n/Nitrobe 77 are the types of steels you want for kitchen knife applications rather than HSS. HSS are better suited for EDC pocket knives that see a mixture of push cutting and slicing of soft abrasive materials like cardboard, carpet and rope.

I know I can get high performance American knives if I pay out the nose, but I'm a firm believer in finding that point of diminishing returns and going no further past it than necessary. Nationalism is the lowest thing on my priorities. Frankly these days with "made in America" being code for "kill minorities on sight", I'm starting to see supporting US manufacturing as being counter to my interests. For instance I've stopped buying Allen Edmonds shoes, just in case. I order my dress shoes from Spain now.

So that's why I'd rather just get Japanese knives. Better bang for your buck, and those companies aren't actively working against me and people like me.

Define "pay out the nose"?

Calton Cutlery has 8" chef's knives in 1095 at ~62 HRC with a high end heat treat for ~$225.

>1095
1095 is over 100 years old, there are simply better steels to use for a kitchen knife in 2017, and some of the better steels aren't even really that much more expensive.

52100 would be better, but he appears to only use that steel for his outdoor knives, and seems to use 1095 for his kitchen knives.

1095 is essentially a direct equivalent for Shirogami #2. Since apex stability is the critical factor for edge retention in repeated cutting board contacts, 1095 is actually a slightly more optimal choice than 52100.

This is because 1095 has a slightly lower carbide volume, and apex stability is associated with lower carbide volumes, higher hardness and smaller grain size.

In any case, the multiple quench, multiple normalization and multiple temper all done to minimize grain size are likely to count for significantly more than the difference between 1095 and 52100.

>1095 is essentially a direct equivalent for Shirogami #2

Yea because Shirogami #2 is considered the most basic high carbon blade steel for japanese knives.

It's rarely used anymore except for more traditional blades.

Aogami 1,2, and super are all better for most use cases, and Aogami is certainly superior to 1095.

The reason 1095 is used is because it's widely available and is cheap, it's not really a great knife steel compared to 5+ others.

On what metallurgical basis would Aogami 1 and 2 be better for this application?

Aogami Super, of you heat treat it to 64-65 HRC I could see being superior (with the gain in hardness offsetting the higher carbide volume).

Just to clarify, I am willing be bet an unlimited sum of money that in a double blind test no one would be able to tell 1095, Shirogami 2, Shirogami 1, Aogami 2 and Aogami 1 apart if they were all heat treated correctly and hardened to 62-63 HRC.

The notion that Aogami 1 and 2 would be noticeably superior is not only technically incorrect with respect to apex stability, but also totally disproportionate to how similar they are compositionally.

Aogami simply keeps it's edge longer.

infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/knives.htm

some good info but the pictures no longer work.

Based on what independently conducted empirical testing?

You may not be aware of this, but all of those steels are compositionally so similar to one another that minute differences in heat treatment and blade geometry are almost certain to overwhelm any attempt to empirically measure differences in edge retention between them.

Leaving all of that aside, the very text of the page you linked shows the mistaken ideas underlying this notion that Aogami will have better edge retention in kitchen use:

"The major downfall of simple carbon steels is their comparatively low wear resistance because of the lower hardness of iron carbide. These steels have high tungsten to form the much harder tungsten carbides for wear resistance. They still have good edge stability because the tungsten carbides are still easily broken up in forging. Blue #1 and #2 have greater wear resistance than any of the previous steels as well as still having good toughness and edge stability. When two steels have the same carbide size and volume but the one steel has harder carbides, the steels will have similar toughness and edge stability but the one with harder carbides will have greater wear resistance."

The problem with this is that wear resistance is almost totally irrelevant in kitchen cutlery use because the overwhelming majority of the wear is from repeated contacts with the cutting board (i.e. impact) rather than slow abrasive wear (i.e. what happens when you slice cardboard, rope, or carpet).

Kitchen knives have a similar blunting mechanism to chisels (though obviously the force of the impacts are much less) and, like chisels, this means that wear resistance plays almost no role in determining their edge retention. Rather, it is a steel's ability to resist microscopic rolling or chipping at the apex that will be the primary determinant of edge retention in this type of application.

and yet from professional users, Aogami EMPIRICALLY keeps it edge longer.

The fact is, the Japanese steels tend to be sharper, and hold an edge longer during kitchen use. Hitachi doesn't sell it to americans, so almost no american knife maker uses it and instead uses 1095/52100/etc

MANNNNY blade smiths in this country wish they could get a steady stock of Aogami super steel for their blade smithing, but the fact that even if you CAN get your hands on it, it generally will be a small amount enough for a few blades, and that isn't REALLY going to give you enough experience to get good at working with it.

Hitachi pretty much only sells to Japanese companies, or individual Japanese blade smiths. The only way i've heard of getting some in the US is being friends with a japanese blade smith (or apprentice) who can get their hands on a few bars of stock for you, at an exorbitant price compared to 1095/1084/52100.

If 1095 were actually better, or even 99% as good, why the hell wouldn't Japanese manufacturers and smiths switch over? It's MUUUUCH cheaper, even in japan.

>"professional users"

Audiophiles also claim lots of things that are shown to be empirically totally false once subject to double blind testing.

These steels are so close in composition that there would be no hope of even attempting to isolate the signal from the noise without using a double blind methodology and identical geometries and target hardnesses.

It is literally difficult to empirically separate VG-10 and s30v without significant experimental rigor, much less steels as similar as Aogami and 1095.

>The fact is, the Japanese steels tend to be sharper

The idea that any steel is inherently sharper is complete nonsense and shows you really don't have a very good understanding of what you are talking about.

"Japenese steels" are not inherently anything, and the notion that they are is a retreat into magical thinking on your part. Any particular steel formulation is a set of chemical content specifications and quality control of its production and nothing more.

Any steel is ultimately just a particular balance of certain properties: Apex stability, wear resistance, toughness, corrosion resistance, cost, hardenability and ease of heat treating.

>is inherently sharper
actual
>Japanese steels tend to be sharper

keep trying kid, i'll be here all day.

Your original phrasing is just as absurd. The idea that any steel "tends to be sharper" shows a total lack of understanding of knives, sharpening and metallurgy.

You're getting pedantic because individual knives made of any steel can be exceptional, it depends on profile, grind, polish, steel, tempering, hardness, etc.

While i'm making broad sweeping generalizations regarding thousands of knives.

On the whole, Japanese steel is superior, and further, the Japanese blade smiths tend to be superior to US/european smiths because of the culture in japan regarding traditional crafts.

Have you even been to japan?

Regarding the ease of cutting (what most people consider sharpness) geometry beats steels anyway. I recently sent some garden variety German kitchen kives from my collection (one was a really nice F. Dick 1778 series though) to Jürgen Schanz, one of the best bladesmiths worldwide, for a professional thinning and polishing job. YOu'd have to buy a very, very high end Japanese knife now if you wanted it to keep up with my Euro beaters out of the box. I don't mind having to realign the edge and having to sharpen them a bit more often for that. And it cost me less than 15€ per knife.

"Because I said so" isn't an argument, neither is stamping your feet and repeating your earlier facile generalizations.

There are a number of small/custom knife makers in North America today doing work much closer to the bleeding scientific edge than the overwhelming majority of Japanese smiths, who, while highly skilled in traditional craftsmanship have been very slow to adopt modern metallurgy based best practices.

Many Japanese smiths still don't use precisely temperature controlled ovens to heat their blades (in fact many still head to color by eye rather than a target temperature prior to quenching), still use water to quench rather than superior media like oil, and still don't apply modern grain size minimization principles by using multiple quenches, normalizations and tempers. Worse still, many still power sharpen their knives without active liquid cooling, running a very high risk of burning the edge.

Unfortunately modern metallurgical science is simply leaving many traditional knife makers behind, both in North America and in Japan. I would much rather have a knife made by someone who keeps up with modern metallurgical science than someone who still does things the way they were done 400 years ago.

I live in japan and I just buy a new 3,000 yen kyocera ceramic santoku every six months or so when it gets too blunt.

only tourists get conned by meme knives. and the ones they sell to foreigners are barely folded 100 times let alone 1000.

>Worse still, many still power sharpen their knives without active liquid cooling
fuck off you've just confirmed yourself as retarded.

I've been to four different fucking smiths in japan and NONE of them sharpened without active cooling.

Jesus fucking christ, i thought maybe you had some argument that could hold water, but you're just making shit up to fit your narrative.

Yes, I'm sure the four smiths you've been to are entirely representative of every other smith in Japan, and that not a single smith in Japan power sharpens their knives without active liquid cooling.

I'm also sure that you didn't just conveniently ignore all of my other points you are totally incapable of arguing or refuting.

Oh you mean your other bullshit points that have no proof besides your obvious intellect.

We've found Veeky Forums's dunning kruger effect

Just admit you are totally out of your depth and lack the ability to first of all understand and second of all to argue the metallurgy.

Resorting to impotent accusations that I'm making it all up out of whole cloth to try and assuage your cognitive dissonance is just embarrassing.

Lol not really senpai, I just got bored of arguing with someone who actually believes 1095 is superior for a chef knife than Aogami #2.

That was already about the point I stopped giving a shit because your opinion is invalid.

I get it, you're white and want to defend your fellow whites. But they can't make steel as good as the nips.

>Continuing to vainly stamp your feet and repeat an assertion you are totally incapable of defending on the merits.

Just stop.

I'm arguing based on the work of a PhD metallurgist and you are just regurgitating platitudes you've heard or read at me, with no capacity to defend their substance.

>arguing based on the work of a PhD metallurgist
If you think a PhD makes you infallible you're having a laugh.

There are hundreds of other people in the world with PhD's in metallurgy, and I bet you $1000 I could find several who would 100% disagree with you.

First of all, I didn't say not imply that I was the PhD metallurgist whose work first quantified apex stability, and secondly your comment is another facile retreat into irrationalism.

What is empirically and demonstrably true remains so no matter how much it hurts your feelings. Feel free to Google "apex stability" "Roman Landes" and investigate for yourself if you have any desire to actually learn something.

>dunning kruger effect
I think I've seen you force this into at least half a dozen posts.

>Worse still, many still power sharpen their knives without active liquid cooling

Nobody making knives with the slightest pretense of quality is dry power grinding, you're thinking of people like this

rather than real knife makers with enough of a reputation to sell to knife shops or internationally

I'm actually heartened to hear it is already fairly uncommon in Japan. It's still altogether too common in North America.

I just wish more Japanese makers would start using temperature controlled ovens, accelerated quenches, multiple quenches, normalization, and multiple tempers.

>I just wish more Japanese makers would start using temperature controlled ovens, accelerated quenches, multiple quenches, normalization, and multiple tempers.
Some do, especially some of the younger guys just finishing their apprenticeships.

Do you have any links to any? I'd very much be interested.