Home Forums Gear Knives and Blades What do you guys think of 1095?

I feel like I'm getting the hang of this knife making deal, no expert by any means but I'd like to start turning them out in number to get some repetition in, but still be able to get rid of them after I'm done, not just throw them in a drawer somewhere. I'd like a cheaper steel I can heat treat myself. I have a electric paragon kiln I can get up to 1700 F and can keep the heat pretty constant once I get to the desired temp. I have a bunch of knives ready in CPM 154 but I still need to do about 4 more before I send them off to be treated at Pete's heat treat. I've been looking at getting some 1095 and wonder what anyone with some experience can tell me about that steel, good bad and otherwise. And if there is a better choice within my parameters for being able to treat it myself( also looked at O1). Thanks in advance.

God Bless,

MM

I have some knives by Billy Watson that he made from 1095 and I like em'. I also have some Damascus blades that David Winston made himself from 1095 and 15N20 and they are sweet.

1095 I have good luck at 1550 F and temper 350 f for an hour let cool then 400 F for an hour. Never had a problem

You can likely use 1095 if you can hold precise temp but you will find 5160, 1070, 1080, and 1084 easier to get good results with.

If we could only find out the heat treat specs that Rowan uses. They do the best job in the business with 1095. An ESEE 4, Rowan made, will stand up to just about anything.

Nothing wrong with 1095 I like it.

O-1 is very forgiving and prolly harder to mess up the heat treat on, or so I hear.

I kinda like the idea of O-1, myself. But either would do me fine.....

It works and makes a fine blade. If it were all we had it would do.

Mostly there are other materials with more customer demand out there. That implies selling 1095 at a lower price point with perhaps the same amount of effort. Eventually I'd let the market drive the material choice at least within a certain range.

I have only one blade that is 1095 tempered by the maker and it's a fine blade but it's a also concealed in a walking staff (not legal in many jurisdictions and a one year mandatory in CA) in this case a conversation piece while other steels see more use.

1095 has been tried and proven as an EXCELLENT knife steel. It is the heart and soul of just about every production made knife to come out of an American knife factory prior to the 1960s. Many of the top bladesmiths today still use 1095.

The trick with 1095 is its heat treat. You have to take it from critical temp (1475, if I recall correctly) to below 900 in less than 1 second. This means you have to use the proper quenchant and quick movement from your forge/oven to your quench tank. It is technically a "water quenching" steel, but even the most experienced of makers will tell you not to waste your time gambling with the "tink fairy" ("tink" being the sound of the blade when it cracks during HT). Parks 50 seems to be the preferred quenchant for 1095 to include Peter's.

If you decide to give 1095 a GO, I would strongly recommend ordering a 5 gallon bucket of Parks 50. To the best of my knowledge, Maxim Oil in Dallas probably still has the best price on it.

I got my first blAde made from some 1095 I got from Jantz. The heat treat went ok, kind of. I used motor oil and was worried it didn't harden because it didn't pass the file test, but when I tried to drill the tang I found out I had definitely had hardened b/c I got nowhere with the drill. I read on another forum there may have been some surface decarborization and that's why the file scratched it. I have an old parogon kiln and it takes a long time to hit 1500, the time it spent above 1475 to 1500 was definitely longer than 10-15 minutes. Could this have caused more carbon to burn off than if the kiln ramped up faster? What do you guys with more smarts in in this stuff think?


Mm

I agree with the statement above with 5160,1084,1080 etc i love 1095 just takes some experimenting to get right. I use a forge and have been able to tweak certain things one thing i can tell you is at very least normalise 3 times. 01 is great as well pretty simple to ht. almost forgot i know some people who use different oils for quenchant with 1095 in my experience you need a FAST quenchant parks 50 is king.

You can apply an ant-scale compound to the blade prior to heat treating and mostly eliminate the scale problem when heat treating carbon steel blades. You can find it at Brownell's.

1095 is a good knife steel, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is an easy to use steel. Most people think that it is much easier than it really is. To maximize the properties of the steel you need to be careful with all steps in the heat treating process. Before hardening you need to be sure what state your steel is in and the only way you can do that is by a careful normalization process as has been already mentioned. This will help control the grain size in the finished blade. It is a detailed process that is too involved to go into here, but it can be easily found by using your friend Google. I mentioned it again because it is probably the most neglected step in the heat treat and yet, one of the most important. Screw it up or don't do it and you are whipped from the start.

To properly harden, 1095 steel needs to cool off really quick, to put it in simple terms. That is the job of the Parks 50. Moving it too fast out of the kiln can cause the blade to bend prior to entering the oil. It is fairly soft when it is at 1475 and just moving it rapidly can bend it. Just do a smooth move from the kiln to the oil and a straight in dunk without any swirling or stirring around. The Parks 50 will cool it off quick enough and you won't lose that much heat between the kiln and the oil. Hopefully you will come out with a nice straight blade and most of the no scale will have fallen off in the quench.

Parks 50 or its equivalent is the only way to go with 1095.

My take on 1095, and I have used a bunch of it in both forged and stock removal knives, is that it rusts. Around here the humidity is very high most of the year and a blade of 1095 will rust while I'm gone to lunch. If you are ok with some rust and a blade that is stained, then it makes a great knife that will take a scary sharp edge, hold the edge fairly well for a carbon steel blade and can be very tough. I made one of my favorite using knives of 1095. It is stained, has rust marks on it and I have to sharpen it fairly often compared to some other knives, but I love the way it looks and it is getting better looking all the time.

So you still need to normalize even if you do only stock removal? I've read otherwise but that doesn't mean those sources are correct. Time for some google time.

Mathsr
That is a good looking user.
Could you share some info on the sheath design? The snap strap setup looks interesting.
Tim

Yes you still need to normalise even if its stock removal

Bradshawblades1 said it and he is right. When you buy blade steel you can't be sure what state the steel is in or what that steel has been through before you get it. I have bought 1095 that was supposed to be in an annealed state only to find out that it had a spring temper. Something like that can really screw up your blade if you try to heat treat it without normalizing. Normalizing it yourself takes time. But once it is done you can rest assured that, if you did your part, you know the state the steel is in and it is ready to be heat treated. This will give you the best chance the blade will turn out like you expect it to.

The sheath is our "wrap strap design." I wish I could say I came up with the design, but I saw the design in a leather working book in the late 70's. I tried it and I was really impressed with the ease of use and the advantages it gives the sheath. The strap is actually part of the welt in the opposite side of the sheath from the knife edge. The strap wraps around the handle and snaps onto the sheath from the front rather than from the back as is the usual case. This completely incircles the handle with a strap of leather preventing the knife from being pulled from the sheath.

The advantages are several. With a knife that has a smaller guard it provides a more secure retention of the knife where a strap just over the guard might allow the knife to still be pulled from the sheath. The strap unwraps by itself when the snap is lifted and the knife is withdrawn, with the guard keeping the strap away from the edge while it is being withdrawn. Since the strap hangs down from the front edge of the sheath it out of the way when the knife is being replaced in the sheath and yet it is still easy to wrap and snap the strap in place with one hand. This placement of the strap keeps it from being cut when either removing the blade from the sheath or replacing the blade in the sheath. The rearward angle of the snap is less likely to become un snapped while going through thick brush or bumping into something that might unsnap a strap that was angled forward. The lighter colored leather at the throat of the sheath is a liner made of goat rawhide that protects the blade from the back of the snap.

I went back and read what I had posted about 1095 and didn't intend for it to sound so harsh. Like every steel, 1095 has certain properties that if you accept, it will make a fine knife. The ability to rust is just one of those properties. It doesn't make as much difference in Arizona as it might in coastal Georgia. We always try to put the right steel with the knife and how it will be used.

We have used 1095 in some of our best knives, especially if it is to be a period piece like the push dagger below.

Is 1095 similar to W2?

I don't have any experience with W2 and would hesitate to pass on any information that I have heard or read about it or its similarity to 1095.

Many will tell you that 1095 is a modern or "cleaner version" of W2. Both are "water quenching" steels and require the same temperatures and procedures of heat treatment. Below are the chemistry certifications of each as provided by Aldo Bruno "The New Jersey Steel Baron's" website. I'm not a metallurgical engineer, so I'll let you make your own decision.

Both steels make excellent blades in my personal opinion.

Chemistry/Certification of W2
Certification: C- .916 Si- .296 Mn- .215 P- .0050 S- .0020 Cr- .069 Ni- .042 Mo- .008 V- .165 W- .005 Cu- .047 Sn- .0060 Al- .006 Annealed Structure: 98% spherodized carbides

Chemistry/Certification of 1095
Certification: C- .990 Si- .220 Mn- .420 P- .0040 S- .0010 Annealed Structure: 92% spherodized carbides