Originally Posted by PapaBull
If work hardening can be upheld, heat treating could be proven to be irrelevant :) Nice soft steel that's easy to hone would work just fine since the edge is hardned by stropping, right? Lead process heat treating.... what a bunch of nonsense .....I always did think the French were a bunch of big fat stewpid loosers, anyway. ;)
How good a blade we have is more determined by the quality of the heat treat than the quality of the steel, itself. Two blades of the same steel can be perform very, very differently and that's all dependent on the heat treating.
I've taken some old beaters and drawn them down with a torch and re-treated them. It's pretty interesting to see it work and to see what it takes to harden steel.