To what temperature I heat to, how long to keep the knife at this temperature: the manufacturer often presents it at a temperature scale but usually without the time of Austenitization! In what do I cool it in, how fast do I do it, are even harder questions. The manufacturer often provides...

            Steel (iron alloy (Fe) with carbon (C)) without any special heat treatment, simply cooled after forging on the open air is soft. A knife made like this can bend in your hands. Before our ancestors had learned how to heat-treat steel, they forged it without any heat....

Another method to check the impact strength indirectly is the breaking-point test. Cutting the steel and hitting it with a hammer break the sample (e.g. knife) as in Izod's test. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izod_impact_strength_test When viewing a broken specimen under a magnifying glass, we...

The mythical toughness  of steel for knives, everyone has heard about it, nobody has ever seen it. Impact strength is the material's resistance to cracking under sudden, rapid load / impact. This is the effort required to break a standardized sample, on a standard machine, under standardized...

"But why do I need all of this information, how is it related to using knives?” The higher the hardness, the higher the resistance to the Cutting Edge (CT) deformation. Because it may seem that we use a low force on the material we are cutting, but that's not the case. The Cutting Edge is...

Hardness. Part one: hardness measurement. Almost every material can be sharpened to cut. Many of us have cut our hands with a soft sheet of paper! You can sharpen the bottom of your bean can to shave your hair from your arm! But sharpness is one thing, and how long you can use it is another. How...