Comment by namibj
4 years ago
Well, I was comparting to/with something like Durit's GD20N [0], which scores 1400 HV30 which should be like 83.6 HRC or thereabouts. It's a WC-Ni powder metallurgic composite with 9% binder. Their website suggests that they make blades for industrial paper cutters, but I'd assume those use normal WC-Co due to paper not being particularly corrosive.
Sure, the geometry matters a lot, but that's also fairly orthogonal from the metallurgy.
That's an interesting material. I'm not a knife maker so I can't really answer your question. I would imagine that this material would, initially, pose a problem for large-scale production. You would have to learn how to work with this material as it is not steel. Their current set of tools and techniques probably won't work well with a fundamentally different material.
If anybody were to try this, I would suspect that it would be easier for a customer knife maker to do so. Kase Knives[1] has messed around with elastic ceramic before. He's always pushing boundaries. He might try something like what you suggested.
It would be incredibly expensive though. I wonder if you could laminate some slabs of mild steel around a carbide core. This is done with steel all the time (especially in Japan). Not sure you could do this with steel and carbide though. You only really need enough carbide to form the apex. The rest of the blade stock is there for lateral strength.
[1]https://www.kase-knives.com/home/english/