440C or ATS-34?

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Fishtail Picklock
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Joined: Sat May 03, 2003 11:10 pm
Location: Forest Grove, OR

440C or ATS-34?

Post by Fishtail Picklock »

Which should work better for EDC? I am leaning toward the ATS-34 for reasons of "edge retention". Since this will be a "working knife" i'm not too concerned about the blade's "stainless" properties.

What say you all?

Fishtail Piclock
Fishtail Picklock
AGENTCOVERT
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Joined: Tue Sep 22, 2015 2:26 pm
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Re: 440C or ATS-34?

Post by AGENTCOVERT »

Well if it was me, I'd go 440C all the way..the overall durability plus edge retention.. (cryogenic treated 440C) is chip free..for a fraction of the cost of ATS-34..I myself prefer D2 a semi-stainless steel with great edge retention for a modest cost overall..hasn't let me down..taken it to 7 countries plus 48 states..
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Viking45
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Joined: Tue Feb 03, 2009 3:07 am

Re: 440C or ATS-34?

Post by Viking45 »

Both steels are excellent for EDC however I have seen quite a few inconsistencies in the 440C,this has a lot to do with the manufacturer.
Some just slap the "440C" label on it and out they go,others take the steel very seriously and when done right 440C can be an incredible steel.
Many high-end custom makers use it with excellent results.

Here is what a very famous knife maker had to say about 440C-

I've received plenty of emails and heard plenty of times in the history of my 3 decades of making knives that someone has purchased a knife made from 440C and the performance was less than satisfactory. Please note that I've received plenty of comments that my own 440C knives are outstanding and the performance is superior. Disgruntled 440C blade owners may go on to claim that all stainless steel is bad, or that 440C is not suitable for good knives. This is bunk, and they are misinformed. However, I believe I know why this happens, and it happens a lot.
440C can be incorrectly processed, and this occurs frequently.

A very well-known maker I know heat treated his 440C in a plain furnace. The furnace was actually a refitted casting burn-out oven and there were no special precautions or processing; the knives were in atmosphere. This means that the blades were not protected from harmful oxygen during the heat treating process. When this is done, the carbon in the steel migrates to the surface of the metal and forms a hard, carbon-bearing crust of scale that is extremely hard and difficult to remove. This effectively lowers the carbon content in the steel and the 440C becomes equivalent to 440B, 440A, or worse. There isn't much carbon in tool steels, and any change in this content will result in markedly lower performance characteristics (wear resistance) because less chromium carbides are formed. This maker's blades decarburized. This lowered the performance of the blade. Another issue is that his oven was painfully slow. It took him many hours to achieve critical austenitizing temperature which allows even more carbon the time to migrate in the steel. Then, he held the critical temperature for far too long, thinking that extended time will assure more transformation and thus a more uniform and robust martensitic structure, but instead, this allows even more carbon migration to occur! Then, he simply air-quenched, a slow, leisurely cooling without interrupted quenching, freezing, or other procedures that can maximize hardenability. He tempered only one time in a toaster oven or his kitchen oven, so his tempering temperature and heat distribution were tenuous, uneven, and uncertain, since these ovens are not calibrated and do not offer truly even, regular, and non-spiking temperatures as a professional heat treating oven would. An additional between-temper freeze and a second temper were never done. Incomplete transformation, uneven carbide distribution, decarburizing, missed tempering, and other process failures accompanied every single one of this man's knives made of 440C. He did do a good polish though (which was easy because the lower carbon makes less of those pesky chromium carbides that are hard to smooth). Now, this man was not some yokel who dabbled on the edge of knifemaking; he is one of the most popular knifemakers who ever lived. And yet every knife he made of 440C was poorly processed, and lacking in performance. No wonder 440C gets a bad rap!

Simply put, 440C is difficult to work with, and hard to finish, and there is a lot of 440C out there that was not correctly processed. This doesn't make it a bad steel, it means the knifemaker was careless. I believe this is one of the main reasons 440C gets a bad rap in some collector's or knife user's circles.
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