Thread: New steel book

Dr. Larrin Thomas just came out with a new book entitled 'Knife Engineering: Steel, Heat Treating, and Geometry'

Looks great! I've been reading his blog 'knife steel nerds' for a while and had hoped that he would put the info into an organized book.
I ordered it the day I saw that it was available. I should get it Aug 1.

Got my copy! I'm excited to get started reading this book. Leafing through it I see many things that I'm very interested in, but I really want to read this from page one, the first time. I like the fact that the first chapter is on steel and knife properties, the mechanical properties in other words. The whole book looks to be very well organized. More later.

Well, where is the nerdy book report. How many stars you giving it in your review?

I'm only up to page 94 out of a total of 440. So far my only complaint is that the book is so knife centric, but I guess that that is expected with a title of 'Knife Engineering'.

Here is an interesting tid bit that I ran across last night regarding polishing steels containing hard carbides;

"With the finer grits the volume of material is reduced, and at some point, the grind depth is similar in size or even smaller than the carbides. At this crossover point, if the abrasive is softer than the carbides it is unable to abrade the carbides and can only wear the surrounding steel until the carbides fall out. Therefore, polishing of vanadium-containing steels is challenging with standard aluminum oxide and silicon carbide abrasives."

Wow! I really got a lot out of the chapter on normalizing and grain refinement.

I see a discussion on sub critical annealing coming up in the next chapter too.

Originally Posted by bluesman7

Here is an interesting tid bit that I ran across last night regarding polishing steels containing hard carbides;

"With the finer grits the volume of material is reduced, and at some point, the grind depth is similar in size or even smaller than the carbides. At this crossover point, if the abrasive is softer than the carbides it is unable to abrade the carbides and can only wear the surrounding steel until the carbides fall out. Therefore, polishing of vanadium-containing steels is challenging with standard aluminum oxide and silicon carbide abrasives."

I can attest to that. It gets downright difficult.

Originally Posted by bluesman7

Here is an interesting tid bit that I ran across last night regarding polishing steels containing hard carbides;

"With the finer grits the volume of material is reduced, and at some point, the grind depth is similar in size or even smaller than the carbides. At this crossover point, if the abrasive is softer than the carbides it is unable to abrade the carbides and can only wear the surrounding steel until the carbides fall out. Therefore, polishing of vanadium-containing steels is challenging with standard aluminum oxide and silicon carbide abrasives."

Originally Posted by DVW

I can attest to that. It gets downright difficult.

In the next paragraph he talks about developing an orange peel surface from using a fine grit with too much pressure on a hard carbide steel. He claims that continuing with the fine grit will only make the orange peel worse and the only way to get rid of it was to go back to a coarser grit.

The whole heat treating section is very good IMO. He goes into a lot of detail into how spheroidization of the cementite occurs and shows how grain reduction cycling will eventually result in spheroidized carbides.

Note that spheroidized cementite, having less surface area, requires a longer soak time to get into solution in the austenite.

That sounds like very in depth book. Does he include heat treating data for the various alloys as well?

Originally Posted by DVW

That sounds like very in depth book. Does he include heat treating data for the various alloys as well?

Yes he does.