1084

Re: 1084

Jack Dover

That's a pretty cool looking blade!

I'm reading through your posts on steel and just wonder why there are no market offerings of plane blades from better steels? I guess if you could figure it in your garage over lunches, it sure possible for someone in a factory settings? Yet we only have low grade blades made from mozzarella or high end blades from Hock and LN. And the low quality blades nowhere to be found, even though big box stores still sell plane-like objects.

No real market..

David Weaver

That's a picture of that blade right out of the quench and after temper, thus the filthy look.

Factory blades are probably air or plate hardening and never get as filthy as this iron, and if commercially done, they get surface ground to final aesthetic and flat.

As to why nothing hits the middle market (the hock O1 blade is really a middle market blade, and could probably be made less expensively in a chrome vanadium alloy with similar characteristics...), I'm guessing because there's no money in it unless you're selling direct (and then the cost of selling direct and dealing with customers probably eats that up). Figure if a hock high carbon blade is $40 at retail, the retailer probably doesn't want to give more than $25 for it.

Really plain steels like 1095, 1084 and probably 52100 (we'll see) warp some and need follow up work, as does O1. 52100 comes out to about $5-$7 a blade in stock costs, and I just looked up the 1084 - it'd be about $4.

I am probably using about $2 of consumables to make one of these. Files and a drill press and grinder are all you really need to make one (soy oil works well, not quite as well as a designed oil for the steel, but it's only a loss of about a point of hardness).

If I ever snuck a page up under an alias and tried to sell blades like these for $30, I'm sure there would be a couple of blog entries and forum posts "they're not ground dead flat", even if I presharpened them and left 1/2 at the end guaranteed flat (the rest would be flattened with use). Not a market I'd want to serve, and not enough in it for a larger manufacturer to mess with.

GREAT for you to do on your own, though. Mapp torch, paint can, $20 of wool blanket and $6 of soy oil and you're in business. All that's needed is to trace the slot in another blade.

XHP takes about twice as long to make as one of these and uses double the consumables (and the cost per iron is something more like $25 each for stock). The V11 iron is the only one I can think of that actually has considerable stock cost.

I'm not even sure that LN is doing their own hardening and tempering - they may not be. Hock's stuff is made in france except for the lower volume blades (so, on contract). How that works on a day to day basis, who knows. It's just not a very big market.