High Speed Steel

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

Aside from being tough to sharpen - how have you found it's edge taking and holding to be?

My experiences with it come mostly from the machine shop. I and other machinists who have taken wood to the s machine shop have discovered that wood is highly abrasive and dulls your HSS tools rapidly.

How's it as it regards hand tools?
Take a really keen edge like O1 or not so much?
Hold the edge longer than A2 or not so much?

[Bruce Page]

My experiences with it come mostly from the machine shop. I and other machinists who have taken wood to the s machine shop have discovered that wood is highly abrasive and dulls your HSS tools rapidly.

Aint't that the truth!
When “milling”, I’ll use a straight flute, carbide router bit whenever possible rather than an expensive end mill. I have ruined more than a few end mills on wood. :(

[Mike Henderson]

For hand tools, I can't see any advantage to HSS. From what I know of HSS, the major advantage is that it doesn't lose its hardness when heated to a temperature which would soften regular carbon steel. Unless you use a high speed grinding wheel to sharpen your hand tools, you'd never generate enough heat to make HSS worth while.

For example, turners use HSS but that's because of the way they sharpen, and not because of heat generated when cutting.

For hand tools, regular old carbon steel works fine. Our ancestors (prior to the late 1800's) only had regular carbon steel and their tools worked fine.

Mike

[Wiley Horne]

Hi Cliff and all,

There has been a little bit of controlled testing on your question by Steve Elliott. See here:

http://bladetest.infillplane.com/html/the_results.html

If you look under his link to 'Initial Sharpness', you find that the sharpness attained on high alloy steels like M2 or CPM3V depends very much on the abrasive. In fact, Steve finds, and I find also, that M2 won't get as sharp as O1 or A2 on conventional stones of any kind, but will get extremely sharp when using diamond paste.

What Steve found (see results under 'Edge Retention') was that M2 and 3V would each outlast O1 or A2 on the order of two-fold, provided the M2 and 3V were truly made sharp. That is, he could plane better than twice as many feet of lumber using the higher alloy steel, before reaching a similar state of dullness. I might add that Steve is a careful and conservative worker, and also an excellent sharpener, and I consider his results are completely credible.

My own experience, which is purely anecdotal, is the same as Steve's. M2 will get as sharp as any other steel, if you use diamond paste for honing. And the edge retention is significantly greater. But if one does not use diamond, it won't really get sharp--even if you sharpen all day.

And of course, if the high alloy steel (say M2) is not made really sharp, then you have the worst of all worlds, which is a steel that won't take a very good edge off the stones you own, even with a lot of work, and which will hold its level of almost-sharp for a long time, giving unsatisfactory results the whole time.

Wiley

[Jim Becker]

"High Speed Steel" is a very general term...there are so many different formulas just as there are with other formats.