01-15-2018, 10:49 PM
Just curious, and to set a lower limit for performance. Annealed steel has a much higher carbide volume fraction than hardened steel, it's just much softer. I wanted to see what would happen, see how low performance really was, and see how old knives that predate hardening would do, ie are these still useful. It was inspired by some research that found some old wootz blades were not martensite (the hard phase you want after quenching), but fine pearlite with various additional carbides. Fine pearlite is still fairly strong, but not like martensite can be.