Materials For Blades
Different steels are suited to different applications. There is a trade off between hardness, toughness, edge retention, corrosion resistance, and achievable sharpness. Some examples of blade material and their relative trade offs:
- The newest powder metallurgy steels can be made very hard, but can quickly wear out abrasives and tooling.
- A blade made from low carbon or mild steel would be inexpensive to produce and of poor quality. A low carbon blade would be very hard to break, but would bend easily and be too soft to hold an edge. High carbon (or high alloy, in some listings) can take a much higher hardness but must be tempered carefully after heat treatment to avoid brittleness.
Unusual non-metallic materials may also be used; manufacturing techniques are quite different from metal:
- The natural volcanic glass obsidian can achieve a nearly molecular edge (high achievable sharpness) and only requires stone age technology to work, but is so brittle that it cannot maintain that sharpness for very long. Also the entire blade is very easy to break by accident. Obsidian is used to make extremely sharp surgical scalpels.
- Ceramic knives hold their edge for a long time, but are brittle.
Read more about this topic: Knife Making
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