Originally Posted by
Patrick Chase
Yeah, so about that...
As I noted above and in other threads, PM-V11 is broadly similar to D2 but with much finer grain structure. If you see durability claims for it that wouldn't seem credible if applied to D2, then they're probably not credible for PM-V11 either. This in turn brings us to Mr Pallas' claim, which does not ring true to me based on my own experience with the steel (the vast majority of my plane irons and many of my chisels are PM-V11). It lasts longer than O1 or A2, and does so without the edge roughness and "chunkiness" that bedevils other such high-wear-life steels, but it doesn't last THAT much longer.
More broadly, tool steel selection for Western hand tools (so ignoring shock) has always been a tradeoff between wear resistance and edge-taking. The very same carbides that make some steels last longer than others also cause those steels' edges to become ragged, degrading edge-taking and leaving tracks on the work. Processes like Hot Isothermal Pressing (HIP, the most common "PM" technology for tool steels) improve matters by "shifting the curve", such that a steel can have better wear resistance for any given level of edge-taking performance or vice-versa. That's how PM-V11 can achieve D2-like wear performance with O1-like edge taking.
There is however no magic, and no easily-honed steel I know of that can last "several lifetimes", at least for my standards of "sharp". Some of the Vanadium-rich PM "super steels" (CPM-10V, CPM-S30V, CPM-S90V, etc) can do quite a bit better than PM-V11, but good luck honing those on anything short of diamond.