Carter wrote: ↑Sun Aug 19, 2018 5:02 pm
I forgot to mention, and maybe it is a little late at this point, because we seem to have adopted a somewhat loose definition of honyaki. I spoke with Ray on Friday about this and he mentioned that for the old timers true honyaki was made from tamahagane steel, so from their standpoint, there would be no shirogami/aogami honyaki. I feel that it is safe to assume current Japanese bladesmiths have moved passed that and are comfortable indicating that a blade is a honyaki from shirogami. Point being, there are always different interpretations of what constitutes a traditional item.
I appreciate Matt's comment above and largely agree with his thought process. I am not comfortable saying one of my blades is honyaki, but I do call it a gyuto...maybe I should change to chef knife. As he states, the knife doesn't know the difference and it cuts no differently.....which brings up another topic for discussion....what is the difference between a forged knife and a stock removal blade. I do understand that in the hands of a master, there may be better grain refinement (as Jack says) with forging....but that also considers very careful forge temp control and refined (no pun) heat treating...the average guy isn't going to reach those levels. I have also spent enough time researching and refining heat treatment of stock removal blades, that a very high level of grain refinement can be had....most of my 52100 treatment comes from techniques developed by Ed Fowler and Rex Walters. Just as an fyi...my 52100 and W2 blades are in and out of the knife kiln 7 times, it is a complex recipe.
Now for where I am a stickler: There is no such thing as a vodka martini, and there sure as hell isn't an apple martini.
I'm glad to see you write this, especially the last line (haha). Seriously, though: the whole tamahagane steel thing is exactly what provoked my simple "razor" response: unless we're talking about something so strict that it also limits other aspects of the knife – which practice tells us is really not the case – this is seems like the issue is pretty cut and dry.
I can see why the use of the term WOULD be significant for your work, Carter, at a larger scale, in the same way that the use of the word "hammer" might be: some customers are really shopping based on knowledge of vocabulary more than knowledge of process. This is splitting hairs with "differentially treated" and "honyaki," of course, since it is rare for someone to know one and not the other. But those people still exist. The forging is more complicated: people still seem confused as to whether the use of a hammer means a knife is forged, or whether it merely requires a "forge" to be forged (i.e., heat-treatment by a knife expert going for knife attributes, rather than heat treatment in a factory prior to actually shaping and grinding the knife and going for particular types of tempering rather than just a raw "HRC").
I remain one of those people who is extremely uncomfortable with the idea that a "hammer forged" knife is
superior to a "stock removal" one; I'm particularly annoyed given that the forging of a knife requires no real folding, only stretching in a variety of directions, some of which do not relate to its intended use. How this can produce a certain kind of reliable or consistent grain structure that survives later heat-treatment in such a way that it is predictably and consistently superior to all other forms of metallurgic manufacturing of "rolled" or prefabricated steel (which is also usually pressurized in manufacture) is beyond my basic understanding of physics (but it also seems to be beyond anyone with advanced knowledge of the process to be able to explain it or guarantee it using any specific explanation that refers to knife-making specifically rather than just abstract explanations that refer to the process of forging more generally). We all know that hitachi steels come in pre-manufactured billets which are merely inserted and hammered thin, not folded, when making san mai blades; it is hard to imagine these billets would be treated differently when making a honyaki version, since the folding of tamahagane is done as a separate part of making the steel, and not as part of making the knife. If the steel is never really stretched and folded, it is hard to imagine how its elements can be satisfactorily redistributed, especially when starting with already very refined alloys. I'm ready to be educated and to change my mind, but all of this virtually always reads like someone describing the benefits of kneeding dough for ten minutes, but then applying it to a no-kneed recipe in which the bread is merely folded and shaped at the end. To be clear: this isn't a knock to the science or to metallurgists. It is more the kind of frustration you get when one person reads something scientific, related to specific constrains, variables, and comparisons, and then sees it applied to any or all similar uses of the process which do not fit the original description. Either I am grossly misunderstanding the metallurgy and the "scale" of impurities (entirely possible!), or those aspects of forging just don't really apply all that effectively to the core steel of hammered blades.
The short of it is that I still think we have a lot to learn about this aspect of knife making before it is properly "de-romanticized" such that we can appreciate excellent products for what they are, separate from unsubstantiated connotations. For now, there is way too strong of a "selection bias," since the vast majority of top Japanese smiths hammer-forge their knives. But I do think with the rise of certain others, including many excellent North American makers, but also including the continued use and appreciation of "stamped" Japanese knives in kitchens everywhere which receive the hardest abuse of all, we may enter a phase when the idea of hammer forging is less of a necessity in terms of claiming the ultimate refinement of a knife "core steel," specifically.
None of this is to berate a preference for hammer-forging: I celebrate that as a preference. It is only when it is used as an unsubstantiated stand-in for "superior to" that I become frustrated. Sadly, this little thread has me feeling the same way about the term "honyaki": if it doesn't stand for "differentially treated," but instead stands for some weird amalgamation of qualities which has no consistent basis in verbal use, and is actually no better or worse than a knife that is "differentially treated" but is used as if it always already refers to some "superior" version of a certain process, then I'll question its use for any contemporary knife, period.
