A Case For Carbon - Part 1
Hello everyone, and welcome back to the FrigidForge blog. It’s been a while since I have done much with the business, but things are getting moving again now! I have some knives in the works that I am really excited to get rolling. Prototypes have been made and are in the testing phase between myself, my Beautiful wife and a couple other beta testers!
I have been in the knife industry for the majority of my life. I grew up in manufacturing, specifically OEM cutlery manufacturing for various companies including Tops, DPx, and ESEE to name a few. The purpose of this post is to make my case for Carbon. Carbon Steel that is!
In the modern consumer cutlery world, by and large, a knife connoisseur is faced with basically two options; carbon steel, and stainless steel. I believe each has its place, and I also concurrently believe that Carbon steels deserve more hype than they receive!
Stainless steel is an amazing material. If you are going to be using a blade predominantly in, on, or around water (especially salt water) for the majority of its life, stainless steel is a no brainer. I choose stainless for my fishing knife for this very reason: fish live in water! If you are a deck hand on a crab boat in the Bering Sea, I would never look down on you for carrying a stainless blade. Now for my most controversial statement up to this point... 98% of other knife use cases need nothing more than a simple carbon or tool steel knife. Furthermore, I believe that many of these use cases actually benefit from this choice.
Sharpening is one of the biggest factors in my reasoning on this topic. If you NEED to sharpen your blade, carbon is what you’d better pray you’re carrying. Need to touch up that edge? I can find you something to abrade your poker basically anywhere on the planet. From the bottom of coffee cups, to broken pieces of tile, concrete chunks, sandstone, even with a little strip of sand paper, you are sure to be able to find something that will put you in a sharper situation. If you are packing stainless, you can still get that edge back somewhat, but you’d better be prepared to struggle for it.
Second on my reasoning list is strength. Need to pry open a door to rescue someone? Hopefully your knife isn’t stainless. Need to do baton through wood for kindling? Again hopefully you aren’t packing stainless. Even IF you break your carbon steel blade, you’re in a better situation, generally speaking, than breaking a stainless one. So long as the heat treatment procedure was done correctly on each, you likely got closer to whatever abusive goal you were attempting with a flexible (sometimes even springy in the case of 1095 and similar spring steels) carbon steel knife than with a brittle stainless one.
That’s probably about long enough for one blog post. Keep an eye out next time for my second installment on this same topic!
Thanks for taking the time to read my ramblings.
Cody L. Rowen