The Brute

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Mathsr

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This is a knife that Charlie made to test a new heat treatment procedure of CPM 3V. He decided to make one he could use this hunting season and give some real abuse to see how it holds up. Its 5" blade is made of 7/32" CPM 3V and is 1 3/8" wide. It carries desert ironwood handles. He said just because it was a test knife, that didn't mean that it had to look bad. The tapered tang makes it balance on the index finger.

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Good lookin knife. Keep us updated on how it holds up and then let us in on his new HT technique.
 
The tests will be going on this fall on this knife. Charlie plans on putting it through the mill as his hunting/truck knife for a while. I have a similar one that we heat treated at the same time that I will finish up after the Guild show. This one we will run some tests (Cutting, chopping, slicing things not meant to be sliced, impact tests, etc.) on in the shop to see how it holds up. None of the tests are very scientific, but we try to be consistent. We have done it to a lot of blades over the years and know where we usually fail with different steels. The bad thing is with the method of heat treatment recommended by Crucible, 3V was very tough and held an edge for a very long time, so if this new way of heat treating results in a better blade... the tests might take a long, long time.

I just thought I would mention that we didn't make up a new heat treatment for this CPM 3V. Neither Charlie nor I are metallurgists and we don't claim to be, we do take their advice though. We got this from a metallurgist that has done extensive work with various knife metals. He suggested this method that is somewhat different from the suggested method from Crucible. He said the resulting hardness would be 60 on the Rockwell C scale and in testing the blades, that is exactly what we got. That is only one test and we use it to insure that we are in the ball park with the expectations we have of our heat treatment. Not as a sole definitive test of the blade.

This new method is resulting in a blade that is a few points harder than the method we have used in the past. What we are hoping is that the blade will retain its edge longer and still retain the toughness that 3V is noted for.
 
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