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Thread: knife maker making a razor
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09-13-2016, 04:11 AM #1
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- Mar 2013
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- Sydney Australia
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Thanked: 40@Boots:
As Mike Blue said above, tempering is not just to reduce hardness/increase toughness, it is also done to relieve stress in the hardened steel.
Quenching is very hard on the structure of the steel, relieving that stress means the blade won’t decide to crack whilst just sitting on the bench or when lightly knocked against something.
If using steel in its fully hardened state was a good idea, it would have been done before and the reams of writing on the process of tempering to get the desired (or at least useful) properties could have been saved.
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09-13-2016, 06:12 PM #2
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- Oct 2006
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- 1,898
Thanked: 9955160 will meet the hardness criteria. Where that steel excels is in toughness. That explains it's strong use in spring applications. The only way to know for sure is make a razor out of it and shave with it. The biggest problem I have with spring steels is that you can't guarantee that old auto/truck springs are the steel you think it is. Given time and tools, making a razor and testing it will tell you a lot.
It's really easier, potentially a lot less heartbreak, to buy a bar of known steel and keep things simple.
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09-13-2016, 09:58 PM #3
No doubt about it there, salvaged steels are not for me. Lucky for us we have the world at our fingertips these days and about any quality blade steel is available. The fear of that "heartbreak" you speak of has kept me from using salvaged steel, Id hate to get to the final edge on a finished project and find that a mistake in material was made. the horror hahaa
If one wanted to use 5160 it is easily obtainable in bar stock from the NJ steel Barron.
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12-07-2016, 07:26 PM #4
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- Dec 2016
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- Bassfield MS
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- 105
Thanked: 2352100 for example is excellent stuff and I have made kitchen knives from it. For razors is doesn't give an edge that is better than O2 (which is my favorite tool steel) but it makes grinding and subsequent sanding at least twice as difficult and time consuming.
I think 5160 would make a decent razor, but I don't know if it would be enough of a difference between other steels, only way to know would be to test them out. The thing about 5160 is that it's a little low on carbon, but the chromium content aids in hardening so you can get a blade in the 59-61 RC range while maintaining chip resistance. Also, from my understanding, it's the carbides that do the cutting, and chromium carbides are tougher than carbon carbides. 5160 properly heat treated will have very small grain size as well which lends itself to a very fine edge, but 1095 will be slightly finer, if not quite the edge holding, so the only real way to know is make two and test side by side. This is all theory when applied to razors though. For the best 5160 I've ever used see if you can get a John Deere load control shaft, it's 5160 that is held to JD's specs which are a lot tighter than the nominal steel industry standards.
As for the original poster, I'm in the same boat, having to learn to look at things differently from knives and there is a learning curve I'm slowly climbing. A straight razor is surprisingly complex for a simple sharpened bar of steel, but then the same can be said of knives.Last edited by will52100; 12-07-2016 at 07:29 PM.