O1 got an unfair bad rap.

[Warren Mickley]

Stainless steel has a bad rap. Maybe that is why Lee Valley did not publish the information that PMvii is stainless. I stopped using stainless in 1965.

[Derek Cohen]

Warren, you're now talking out of the wrong hole. You have read the extensive testing David did and posted at Wood Central. For someone who admitted that he went into testing PM-V11 with a great deal of skepticism, he came out a total believer. David would now argue that it is the best tool steel available for woodworkers.

I use PM-V11 all the time. I use O1, W1, A2 and M4 as well, amongst others. I did blind testing for Lee Valley many years ago. I have completed testing with chisels of different steels, and posted the results on my website. So ... please, play your games elsewhere.

Regards from Perth

Derek

[David Bassett]

... I _think_ I read a Tom L-N interview a few years ago that was already a few years old then where Tom said the contractor who was doing the tempering on the L-N O1 product retired and they just haven't been able to replace the operator doing the tempering. I think I read it on the internet so it must be true. I love my L-N tools, but A2 is not my favorite steel. ...

Well, I don't remember reading that, but I did hear Thomas Lie-Nielsen say that publicly. It was at PopWood's (RIP) Wood Working in America 2016 during a panel discussion.

I'm not sure how L-N was on the panel of small (or boutique?) plane makers, yeah they're smaller than LV, but compared to the other guys on the panel L-N seemed like GM versus Joe who completes a car in his garage once every couple decades. Anyway, the panel was ask what steel they used and why. Each answered "O1 because I can heat treat it myself", until it got to Tom. He replied "A2 because our O1 heat treat vendor retired and the only alternative we found locally with the quality we want does A2." (Quotes probably paraphrased some.)

[Curt Putnam]

O1 does simply not have a bad rap, no need to defend it.

I've only been reading woodworking forums for about 118-20 years. During that time I do not remember anybody dissing O1. Lots of articles about this or that alloy having longer edge life but nine saying that they got sharper than O1. Thus far, my PM-V11 edges get as sharp and last longer at angles of 25° or better. I've not tried it lower angles. I took the PM-V11 iron that came with my shooting plane and put it in my LA Jack and the O1 iron in the shooting plane. I do not run the shooter enough for edge life to be an issue.

[Charles Guest]

There are apparently a lot of people in this thread unfamiliar with the concept of "damning by faint praise."

[John C Cox]

O1 is good stuff, but it's pretty new on the grand scheme of things.

The better chisels of old were simply clean, fine grained, plain high carbon steel. The big thing was always heat treating them properly to get the benefit of the carbon and clean steel.

One of the eye openers for me, when I started down the rabbit hole of steel alloys was how easy it was to have lots of carbon in steel, but not much of it was useful because of improper heat treatment.

The steel guys know this, but the business guys push for faster cycle times, yielding higher throughput levels... The trade off ends up leaving carbon out of solution or incomplete conversion of Austenite to Martensite - because that stuff takes time.

And then there's warpage and cracking... Water quenching is a beast for warpage and cracking. Olde Chisels were heat treated as square sided firmers, then all the bevels were ground post heat treatment. That's slow and expensive. They turn into bananas if you machine bevels first, then heat treat second...

And so the answer to all this was magic alloys, that were better on paper, more cooperative with their high volume industrial production...

Luckily, the market has shifted to the point where we can now get good stuff made by boutique makers... It's spendy, but that's about the only way to get it now.