Wears like high carbon steel (no chip outs, high quality edge throughout sharp to dull cycle), but almost as durable as most A2 steel blades.

13-09-02 One note, from the DICK Fine Tools data sheet for this steel:

Grinding

It is very important to avoid temperatures above 150�C once it has been hardened and annealed. Grinding the steel on a dry sharpening machine or belt sander is especially harmful its crystalline structure. We recommend using a water-cooled sharpening machine or sharpening by hand using Japanese waterstones.

So, when grinding stay well back from the edge. Of course, 3M on glass is an excellent alternative for honing.

The lamination is clear. The hard steel back is called Blue Steel in the catalog.

I don't know how they managed to get such different appearance on the two parts of the blade. The scratches cross the full bevel, but the softer steel portion looks very different. Perhaps they did some kind of heat treatment after grinding this bevel. The appearance when I ground then honed was much more uniform.

The machining marks on the back run parallel to the edge, so does not show up well with this lighting. The back has not been honed at all.

I labelled the 4 bevels. I now routinely add a scratch on both bevels to allow me to find exactly the same part of the bevel at each stage of the test.

The bevel labelled 120 is the primary bevel - ground using a 120 grit AlO sanding belt.

The 15u (micron) abrasive was getting a little worn. The 15u bevel was not as wide as I usually get, and the 5u abrasive ended up removing almost all of the 15u bevel. The 0.5u abrasive removed almost all the of 5u abrasive scratches.

The wear bevel appears as a faintly darker band along the edge. It shows no glints, a characteristic of what I have been calling High Carbon steel blades (like older Stanley blades, O1 and W1 steel blades). It is 3 to 4 pixels wide.

By enlarging the picture (digitally) I can see that the wear bevel is about 9 pixels wide. This is well above average for this type of steel, almost equal to A2 steel.

The back wear bevel, the almost black region at the edge, shows no scratches at all. There appear to be no irregularities in the surface that are large enough (roughly 0.7 micron or larger) to reflect light.

The wear process appears to be removing very small pieces of the blade, and is doing it faster than in the M2 steel case, but in a way that leaves a very smooth surface.

The wear process is dislodging relatively large pieces of the blade, but is doing it very slowly.

Unlike A2 blades however, the largest pieces dislodged appears to be quite small - there are no chips along the edge.