SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to the Good Old Blades Podcast. I am your host, Aaron LeVere, and join me as we talk to other knife makers and craftsmen about anything and everything knives. Thank you for listening in to another episode of the Good Old Blades Podcast. I am your host, Aaron LeVere, and I am joined by Dr. Laren Thomas. If you had there you go. If you have not had the chance to pick up uh uh Laren's uh book on knife steals and heat treating, I highly encourage that. But Laren also has a new book that came out, and I'd like to talk a little bit more about that and dig into Laren's life and make him feel a little bit uncomfortable. So Laren, again, thank you for joining me.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Yeah, I'm excited.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

So um customary for the show, uh, if you can give a little bit of history of you know you outside of knives, although I know having a uh a dad who's been in knives in Damascus as long as uh he has, uh it's kind of traveled with you since um birth, basically. But um what what is what do you do outside of it, like outside of knives, like uh hobbies, um family, things like that. I mean, share whatever you want to.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Alright. Uh so yeah, I can be boring because my hobby is knife steel, and my job is developing automotive steel. So it's all steel all the time for me. But the automotive steel is a lot different. We can talk about it if you want. Um, but you know, so my hobbies knife steel is my hobby. You know, this is what I'm spending my extra time on, which is not time spent with family. And so really I'm balancing my time between work, knife steel, and my family. Those are my three priorities. I don't get to watch much TV, I don't get to play many video games, but I do get to spend time on those three things. And so me and my family, you know, we like going on hikes, we like going to theme parks, uh, you know, some of the normal stuff. Uh we've got a local theme park here in Pittsburgh called Kennywood, and so we like to go uh ride the roller coasters, go on the whip, uh eat some uh you know, chicken strips, some fresh cut fries. So, you know, we we have a good time. But people ask me sometimes how I fit in the things that I do, and the answer is I do those three things, and that's it.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

So um so I d I don't know if you know this. Uh I was born in Pennsylvania, born and raised until I uh moved down to Texas when I was 18. But I was on the opposite side of the state, uh near Wilkesbury Scranton area. Um so uh if you ever get the chance to mosey over that way, there's a family-owned amusement car park called Kenobles that's really good. We went last year. We went last summer. Oh yeah. Yeah, how'd you like it?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Uh we loved it. So I wasn't a hundred percent sure what I would think because on paper Kenobles looks like a typical theme park, like a middle-of-the-road theme park. I also knew that its reviews were really high. People love Kennobles. Um but it's a free theme park, meaning admission is free and you pay per ride, and that and also the food is pretty affordable. So I knew it got a lot of praise just for that, and that covers up a lot of problems with a theme park. And so I like, well, is it just because it's free and you pay per ride and so everybody likes it for that? Is it really gonna be fun? But we we had a great time at Kennoble, so we stayed at the campground in our pop-up camper, and you can walk right into the theme park. You're literally right next to like giant wooden structure of roller coasters in the little campground there. And the food was great. Uh, you know, we rode those wooden coasters, they don't even have seat belts, which is pretty rare these days, so you're really popping out of the seat. Uh but they've got uh this carousel, a merry-go-round, where there's these rings you pull out of this little dispenser thing, which I guess is is an old thing with that was common in merry-go-rounds, but not anymore.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Uh, and then if you get the uh like the brass ring, I think, then you get like a free ride ticket or something. So my kids were loving that. So I mean we had a we had a great time at Cennobles.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Yeah, I can't tell you how many times riding that carousel, because it the little arm that comes out that dispenses the rings, you know, is metal, and we would uh we would slap it to get the ring, and we'd uh I'd have like short fingernails and just like totally rib my fingernails. I'd but sometimes we'd ride it so much my fingers would be bleeding afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

It feels a little dangerous. It feels like if you hit it wrong, it'll just uh pull your arm off. So uh maybe there's a reason they've taken them out, but yeah, it's a good time. So no seat belts on the roller coasters and rip your arm off pulling rings out. Uh it's a great time. Highly recommend it.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Yeah, I mean it's uh it's like traditional 80s, 90s type of fun. Like if you're not uh almost dying or getting tetanus from it, it's no fun.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah. Oh, I was gonna say those uh they had the McDonald's fun places, whatever they call them. Uh they were everywhere when I was a kid. And then they had Discovery Zone, which was just a giant McDonald's fun place. Like those tubes would just go for miles, you'd get lost in them. And then the ball pits full of dirty diapers and whatever else was in there. But we had a great time.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Yeah. One thing that is interesting about Kenobles and uh probably in in some ways Pennsylvania history in general is like they uh so they do have the old wooden roller coasters, which are a fairly rare in the United States theme park, uh um echelon of theme parks. And uh, but one thing that's really cool is they have a few Nickelodeons there that are functional. Um I don't I don't know if they're still operational because it's been quite a few years since I've been there. But um for the carousel ride and then uh by the Phoenix roller coaster, uh there were you know functional Nickelodeons, I think, from you know the late 1800s approximately that they still had up in operational.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Yeah, they seem to like at Cenobles restoring old rides, old things, and that's something they take pride in. So so yeah, it feels very uh out of time when you go there. But I I will say on the subject of East versus West Pennsylvania, there are lots of Pittsburghers that have never been to Philadelphia. Like sometimes people ask me if I I like my um my Philly cheesesteaks in Pennsylvania. I'm like, you know, wrong, wrong side of the state. They just group them together. But I mean Pennsylvania or Philadelphia is like more the you know New Jersey, New York giant metropolis area. And over here in Western PA, you know, it's just Pittsburgh and then Ohio and West Virginia. You know, we're not really part of the same part of the country.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah, and I I think that's something that uh is an interesting distinction in Pennsylvania because yeah, you do have Philadelphia, which is city folk mostly and suburbs. It's probably the the closest that you get to a true city type of feel out of anywhere in Pennsylvania, and then you have steel on the west and you have coal on the east, and then a bunch of mountains and Amish and things like that in between.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yeah, there's like the city, so here in Pittsburgh, there's the city of Pittsburgh, then there's rural Pennsylvania surrounding it, and then there's like a diffusion in between of suburbs. And if you get 10 or 15 miles outside of Pittsburgh, like I was talking to a knife maker in Wes Newton, and he was like, I don't live in Pittsburgh. I'm like, I I just came from there. It's a 15-minute drive. Like you're in Pittsburgh, you know. They see themselves as in a different place.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

So Yeah. Yeah, I used to go out every year to Ligonier. I it's I guess it's Idle Wild Park that they do the uh the Scottish Highland games every year. And uh I played uh I played cat classical violin for a long time, but my uh my teacher was from Nova Scotia, and so she uh she really liked uh Scottish Highland fiddle music, and so I learned that and then would go out and compete in Ligoneer. And then we went out to uh falling water, like the Frank Lloyd Wright property and stuff too. So I've been out there a few times, but not not as much as I've stuck into the hills with uh all of my other hillbilly you know kin.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

Yeah, yeah. Well there there is definitely a similarity among rural Americans, no matter where you are. So I moved, well, I grew up in Vegas till I was eight, and then rural Nevada uh through high school. And so rural Nevada is really what feels like home to me. And rural Pennsylvanians do remind me a lot of rural Nevada. So I'm sure there are differences, of course, but you know, people on four-wheelers wearing camo does feel more like home.

SPEAKER_00 9:08

Yeah, well, uh so for uh for the sake of not just gabbing on about uh locales and everything, um I'm interested to know, you know, I I would like to get kind of a little bit of a history of you and your experience with knives. I know it's kind of been covered uh somewhat in other places, but you know, for everybody who uh doesn't know the lore of Laren Thomas, his dad is Devin Thomas, makes Damascus, has uh been a cutlery uh knife maker and knife maker in general for forever. Um I actually bought some of uh your dad's uh Damascus secondhand from a knife maker a while ago, so I'm kind of coveting it in my little cubby of things that I don't want to touch uh lest I screw it up. Um yeah, I've heard that a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, so it's not not uh not as much made as you know the other things. You get Vegas Forge because it's a modern uh manufacturing and like they push out a bunch of it. You get Chad Nichols, you get uh Dama Steel and things like that, Bill Poor, but Devin Thomas is like the rare stuff. It's like Bill Burke and Devin Thomas.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Yeah, I mean my dad was making a lot of Damascus back in the day, but he has officially retired from selling Damascus, so uh that is why it's much more difficult to obtain these days. Uh he was just recently inducted into the Cutlery Hall of Fame, which I think is uh a really big deal. Uh if you look at that list, it's some it's also called the Blade Cutlery Hall of Fame because it's done by Blade magazine, but there really isn't any other major Hall of Fame uh that competes with it. And so, you know, that list of people in there is extremely impressive, you know, all the way back to Bo Randall and A. G. Russell and Bob Loveless, and so they're all on, they're all legends. And uh that's not something that my dad or I ever thought was going to happen. Uh and one day we started to hear some some rumblings that behind the scenes people in the Hall of Fame were pushing putting my dad's name forward as someone to be inducted, and we're like, okay, you know, maybe in another year or two that might happen, and then uh then they announced that he was inducted. So that's uh very exciting. I think it reflects well on my dad's position in the industry, you know, how he's contributed to the development of Damascus and knives over time, and uh I'm just really excited for him.

SPEAKER_00 11:35

Yeah, so what uh early years of of knife exposure and everything. I mean, obviously you have your dad, but um I I was uh listening to some other interviews and things like that that you've done in the past. And uh so he started bringing you to knife shows pretty early on. What was that like as a kid? I mean, is it just standard, like, oh, that's just dad's hobby stuff, or um, did it catch your your imagination and your heart early on?

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Well, it wasn't my dad's hobby, it was my dad's business. So from as long as I can remember, that's what he did full time. I know that when I was very young, he did have a couple other jobs. So he was a welder, his dad was a welder. Uh then he worked in like metal fabricating, like making railings and things in Vegas. Uh, but from the time I was very young, he was full-time Damascus. And that's what he's been ever since. So this this wasn't just my dad's hobby thing, it was my dad's business, which in a way maybe even changes things from there. You know, uh you hear all the time, if your dad's a lawyer, you don't care about being a lawyer, or your dad's a doctor, you don't care about being a doctor. And to some extent that was true for me, you know, my dad was making Damascus, and it's like, okay, you know, that's that's what dad does. You know, I'm happy he's doing that, but it's not something that I'm going to do. But yeah, pretty young, as a teenager, like 13 or so, he started taking me to a couple hammerins, a couple knife shows, and what really stuck out to me was all the knife makers that were talking about, steel and heat treating and you know, all the performance aspects. You know, I am a nerdy engineer today as a professional adult, and that fits my personality. Those were the things that really stuck out to me. So we'd go to these shows and people would talk about these secret steels or the secret heat treatments, and so I would pester my dad with questions about this, and you know, he knew about a lot of these things. He had to learn about steel to make Damascus, how to heat treat Damascus, how to sell it, how to troubleshoot things when people were having trouble. So he knew some metallurgy. Uh, and then I got into it more and more. You know, I read uh Dr. John Verhoeven's book. It was called something like Metallurgy of Steel for Bladesmiths and Others Who B make Knives, something like that. It was a really long title. Now it's published as Steel Metallurgy for the non-metallurgists. That was coming out in my mid to late teens, so I read that book. Uh, and I just got more and more into it. You know, I was on on Blade Forums. I think you can see join dates on blade forums. I joined in like 2001 or something, really early as a teenager. And so I'd go on and I would debate uh everybody else about steel because I was really into it. I wanted to know everything about it.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Yeah, that's interesting. Um what what made you take the jump then from this like uh uh fanaticism about metallurgy and uh I guess I guess figuring out what was true or false about uh heat treating and everything to a PhD and then to be a a published author. I mean, because it takes a lot of time and dedication.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah, well, it wasn't a clear path. You know, I was in rural Nevada in a very small high school, you know, so my class was like forty, fifty students, and I was like number five, which maybe in a class of five hundred would be impressive, but in a class of fifty that meant I was in the upper tier, perhaps, but not uh looking like I'm on the road to a PhD in engineering. And I went to a year of junior college and I did well there. The main thing that I got at junior college uh was just confidence in myself to go to college because again, I wasn't going straight to a large university doing engineering, that was not in my mind at the time. I didn't see myself as being smart enough to do something like that. So I went to junior college. I did really well in pre-calculus, which is not a high-level math course for someone starting in engineering, which I was not yet. So I took pre-calculus and I aced the class, which surprised me because in high school I was pretty mediocre at math. I got a lot of B's in math. So I was passing, but it's not like, oh, I'm I'm a math genius or like math is one of my passions. No, I did not do that well in math in high school. I did passably. I wasn't failing, I wasn't acing. So I took this class in junior college, and he was a lawyer who ta taught math on the side. And he he described himself as a funny fat guy, and he would tell us to write really good reviews for him so that he could be made a full-time professor. And just everything he said made sense to me. All of a sudden, all these things were clicking, and I'm like, well, maybe maybe I can do some complicated degree, maybe I can go and do computer science or something. And then my dad was having some health problems, and I worked for him for a year. So I was not going to school. I lived at home in Panaka, Nevada, with nothing to do, and I just worked for him for a year. And I had a lot of time to think. I was very frustrated. Uh, you know, I was happy to do it, but I was also I also felt stuck, you know, when you're a young person and you really want to go to school or be with friends or find a girlfriend or whatever, being trapped in a small town working for your dad is not always fun. And during that time, I made a couple knives, I sold them, I had some minor dreams of being a knife maker, uh, but ultimately what I decided was I'm gonna go get a degree in material science. So I was in Nevada, the universities there are pretty inexpensive, and University of Nevada Reno had a bachelor's degree in material science and engineering. So I left and I got that degree, and you know, I didn't know exactly what I was gonna do. I was really into steel, but when you get a degree in materials, you know, you learn about some metals, you learn about some steel, but it's not like they're telling you about S35 VN and vanadium carbides or something. You know, they're teaching you about the fundamentals of how metals and materials work. And just like when you're taking your intro classes for any degree, that can be frustrating also, just like, oh man, when are we gonna get to the good stuff? Why do I got to learn about all of this minutiae and these equations and things? So I'm getting near the end of my bachelor's degree and like, okay, you know, what are my career plans? You know, I did find in school, I but I had gotten a couple of C's. I remember there was a frustrating class in statics that I took, which is a regular course that most engineers have to take. And I found the teacher to be really good. I understood him, I thought the class was really fun, and every test I took, I just got a C on it. I when I studied for the test, I could do every problem out of the book. And then I'd get to the test and just get a C. I was like, what is going on? So I'm like, well, surely the second test I'll do much better. And just I kept getting C's on those tests. Don't know what happened. You know, there's some classes you don't learn anything, you get an A, some classes you learn a lot and you get a C. You know, it happens. But I look at my GPA and it's uh 3.7. And I'm like, wow, that GPA is a lot higher than I thought it was. And really what has always interested me about steel is designing steels. You know, when I was a teenager, I was really excited about the release of S-30V. It was this new crucible powder metallurgy steel designed just for knives. And at the shows, I would go and talk to these crucible metallurgists and I'd call them on the phone. Uh Dick Barber was the metallurgist over the development of S-30V. Scott Devana was a sales metallurgist who would go to a lot of the shows, and I talked to both of them quite a bit, asking them lots of questions about steel. And I was just fascinated by this idea of developing a new steel. You know, what alloying elements are you gonna add? How are you gonna get high edge retention and high toughness and high corrosion resistance? I'm like, well, if I want to do RD and develop new steels, I really need a graduate level degree. And this GPA, it looks like it'll be good enough for me to go to grad school. So I looked into grad schools, I emailed uh John Verhoven, who we mentioned earlier, I emailed George Krauss, who wrote Tool Steel's 5th edition. I asked them where I should go to school, and they both told me Colorado School of Mines. Even though John Verhoeven uh he taught at Iowa State, I believe, he also recommended Colorado School of Mines as a good school for steel and metallurgy. So I said, well, he must know. And I looked at the program, they were doing lots of steel research, they have a steel research center there, and so I started studying a lot for the GRE, which is like the ACT SAT, but for grad school. And so I'm like, well, I gotta get a good score on this thing. So I studied that for months, I think more than people normally study for that dumb test. Uh even a an undergraduate student that I recommended that she study a lot for it, she was like, people don't take that anymore. And I felt really old. Though it still exists, but apparently it is declining in popularity. Uh okay, so where are we going next? So I went to grad school, I got that degree. I uh luckily was able to get a job at U.S. Steel Research, developing new steels. I was excited about that because development jobs in steel, there's not that many of them. There's a lot more jobs for mill metallurgists, quality metallurgists, etc., which didn't excite me that much. I wanted to design new steels. So U.S. Steel Research had openings, I got the job. Uh, and I worked there for two or three years before I started Knifesteel Nerds. And I really hadn't done much, if anything, with knife steel while I was in grad school and in those early years of my professional career. I think in part because I had given up on the idea of working with knife steel, just because. Because, like, okay, this is such a tiny niche. Uh, how am I gonna work in that industry? It's just not realistic. So let's kind of put it out of your mind, focus on the exciting parts of steel you can work on, and just leave knife steel behind. But as I was working for US Steel Research, I really enjoyed it, but that the knife steel stuff was coming back to me. You know, you were very busy in grad school, you were busy in your early career, you've got a little extra free time. Let's get back into knife steel. So I go on blade forums, you know, where I used to enjoy spending a lot of time. I'm answering questions about steel. I I wrote up a little mini article or two for blade forums, just to make a new post about cryogenic processing or something like that. And I I put a bunch of work into that, I publish it, get some good comments, get a couple questions, and then it's back in page two or three a week later. And then someone starts a new thread asking questions about cryo. And I'm like, why am I wasting my time with this? So I'm like, I know, I'll make a website, and then if someone wants to know about cryo, they just find that article on my website, it's always there. Or if someone asks the questions about cryo, I just link to an article I wrote for my website. So I started writing articles for that, and it just grew from there to, you know, now I'm associated with Knifesteal in many ways, you know, developing Magna Cut, two books, uh, you know, so I'm all in.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

So yeah, and for every uh anybody who's interested, the uh the website is knifesteelnerds.com, and uh it is a uh compendium of a lot of information that Laryn spent a lot of time compiling, and everybody uses it in one way or another now. So uh it is probably as close to de facto um on heat treating and cryo and everything like that that you'll ever find in the industry, and uh buying his book will blow your mind too.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Yeah, knife engineering was my first book, and like so just like I got frustrated with the forums and their limitations, I started to get frustrated with the limitations of a website and a blog. Because it's just, you know, like every week or other week or once a month I put out an article, and again they get lost in time, you know, several pages back on my website, and you know, I write an article about something specific, you know, the toughness of 52100. And but there's all this background information I can't be including in every single article. I'm not gonna tell you everything about steel metallurgy and heat treating in an article when I'm trying to get to the toughness of 52100. You know, just I can't rehash it every single time. I'm like, well, a book is perfect for this where you can introduce concepts a step at a t at a time and show you the big picture so that you're not missing details because you don't know what I'm referring to in an article. I already introduced any necessary information for you before you got to chapter seven on toughness of steel or whatever it is. And people have responded very positively to the book. Uh maybe eventually I'll be able to do a second edition to update it or add some more experiments and rewrite the sections that I don't like now. But yeah, so uh I've learned a lot about the benefits and detriments of different formats. So, you know, we talked about forums versus a website versus a book. I've got the YouTube channel now, and so I try to tailor what I'm doing to the medium. You know, let's make the best thing that we can for people to learn in this medium.

SPEAKER_00 25:41

Yeah, well, and uh the you know, speaking personally, the the thing that I like about your book is I I felt at least when I was originally getting into heat treating my own work, because before I'd just send it out to Paul Boss and tell him the knife's night uh the knife steel itself and the rockwall harness I was shooting for, and he would take care of everything. Paul Farner over there, right? And it was pretty, pretty simple. But when I decided that I was going to uh start heat treating myself, I had to make a decision. I was like, am I either going to do it right or am I going to uh am I going to fail at it and then have to just go back to Paul Farner uh to have things heat treated, right? And uh finding the heat treating recipes themselves for the different types of steels I was using was a little bit frustrating because you know you have the manufacturer specifications and then you go on uh Blade Forum or some other, or maybe maybe people were covering it on YouTube, and it seemed like there was so much variation in what you were supposed to do, and then I'd have to sit and you know, trial and error all these different uh coupons of uh of steel in order to figure that out myself. And I'm like, what's the point if all this data is out there uh but I can't discern what is actually true or false, and I have to test it anyhow, uh, it makes it really difficult for me. So uh the like going on your website, I could find that information, but I had to sift through uh all these articles that you were writing on specific things in order to find those recipes, right? So when you came out with your book, it was like, oh man, I can go directly to this section. I have I have uh little tabs for each steel type that I use, and then I'll have special notes that I write in the book for uh for certain things. But single-handedly, you've saved me so much time and and increased the consistency of my heat treating process just by writing that book and making it an easy reference. And then if I want to go back through and learn the individual components, like what makes this the way that it is, then I can go through and read the you know the front half of the book. But I mean, all of it is just a humongous uh time saver and and a lot of knowledge dump for makers like me. And I I really have to uh like thank you because you've you've you've changed the paradigm of heat treating and metallurgy for the you know the hobbyist and the common knife maker by releasing that book and it's been phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

Well, the benefit of learning the fundamentals, you know, like what are you doing when you osinetize, what are you doing when you're quenching, what are you doing when you are tempering, is that you then know what these different heat treating recipes are trying to accomplish. So sometimes, you know, the recommendation I give for heat treating might be different than another recommendation, which is mostly a difference of philosophy. You know, like you might achieve similar things in the end. Sometimes recommendations are just bad. You know, you're you're osinitizing too hot, you're tempering too cold, or whatever it is. Uh so that's where it's beneficial to know the fundamentals, you know, like should you add in cryo or not? If you don't know what cryo is doing or not doing, you don't know. And so if someone tells you, oh, you absolutely have to do cryo, you can only take their word for it. You know, you don't you don't know why to use it or not to use it. Or they just tell you general things like, oh, better edge retention or better toughness or just lies about what it's doing. And so you just live in this sea of confusion. So that's why I recommend reading things like my book so that when someone gives you a line of bull that you you know that they don't know what they're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

Yeah, so how does it feel to be the uh the proponent of all these uh all this data and then have a bunch of people argue over what's the best super steel and everything based off of your data?

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Well, I can't say that I'm the only one to ever have done this. You know, there are other people that have tried uh to teach people about steel and metallurgy. Uh well when I say try, I don't mean that they have failed. I just mean that we're all trying the best that we can. Uh, you know, so even people like Wayne Goddard, who gets a chapter in my book, he wrote a lot about heat treating and steel choice and things in Blade magazine. Uh not everything he ever wrote is accurate, but he tried his best. He did his own rope cutting tests and other types of tests. And so through experimentation and study is really where you learn things. And Wayne Goddard was very good at that. And so there's a lot of people who have taught about steel, I can't name them all. Uh one person who comes up uh is Kevin Cashin. So a lot of people say that Kevin Cashin taught them a lot of things. He mostly targets uh what he says to bladesmiths, you know, using simple steels, but I'm sure he could talk about other things. Um so sometimes people want us to want to pit us against each other, you know, saying that our ideas contradict, or what do you have to say about this? That contradicts what this other guy said. It's like, well, it it doesn't have to be a competition. We all have the same end goal here.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Well, uh something that I I don't know if people recognize in the industry too much of you know knife making and knife collecting is there's there's a certain amount of snobbery that comes from steel types. Like uh some people are like it's A2 or nothing, some people are like D2 is the best, some people are like M390 or something like that is the best. And it's really gotten to a point now where um it really is uh splitting hairs over some of the performance of of you know the the general tool or the general steels that people are using for knife making. Um but there's all this data now to back it up and say, hey, well, like like maybe this one steel has a m a marginal amount of difference that increases its toughness or edge retention or whatever, and it just spurs on the argument and the uh specificity that collectors use uh when they're choosing steels or having uh you know custom makers uh develop you know blades for them. So it's kind of interesting.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Yeah, I like to talk about steels in terms of categories. You know, like you said, splitting hairs, like if steels are in the same category, yes, you can still debate on like, okay, maybe M390 has a little bit more edge retention than S30V and a little bit less toughness, but they're still in the same category of performance. You know, if you want to talk about big differences and we can compare M390 and AEBL or M390 and 14C28N, uh, you know, then we're talking about different categories or you know, even bigger differences like a low alloy steel like O1 versus a high alloy steel like S30V. Uh and so then we can really talk about the big differences and why they have big differences. Uh but when when you're debating about two steels in the same category, you know, that's the realm for nerds like me. And uh, you know, it m may or may not matter that much to your knife making process or to the end customer.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

Yeah, well, kind of on on the point, when it comes to uh a lot of the super steels that you see out here uh today, I've I've noticed again, it's it's like a it really comes down to uh a maker only has so many steels that they can put in their rotation for uh for for making things, right? And it seems like uh the tides change when it comes to what the market is looking for um fairly fast. Like it it used to be that CPM 154 um S30V or S30 uh S35 VN were kind of like the um the the that's what you thought of when you were looking for a uh uh uh uh high quality uh stainless. But now that Magna Cut has come out, um everybody's like, oh, is this Magna Cut or is it anything else? And then you have people who are like, like, absolutely it's Magna Cut or nothing. Um so it's it's interesting how the the data and and the the invention of these new steel types and everything really dictates some of the market because I get asked quite a bit for uh Magna Cut specifically.

SPEAKER_01 34:18

Well, one challenge with steels for custom knife makers is that the hand rubbed satin finish is a major element of many custom knives. And when you have a steel with high vanadium and niobium like magna cut or S30V or some other steel, then that makes the hand rubbed finish much more difficult to achieve because vanadium carbides are harder than the abrasive in most sandpaper, which is typically aluminum oxide, sometimes silicon carbide. Uh and so, yeah, that's a number one complaint from knife makers about those types of steels. And so I think CPM 154 is gonna have its place for the foreseeable future because it does not have those harder carbides, and the steel is pretty good still, you know, not as good as Magna Cut Shore, uh, but it's still very good and it's a little more knifemaker friendly. So, yeah, there's still gonna be steels out there that aren't 100% optimal but are a little easier to work with.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

Yeah. Well, and there's also some knife makers that they don't have uh they don't have the investment in a liquid nitrogen or things like that to do cryo treatments. And CPM 154 seems to do pretty well performance-wise without cryo, but that's also something that uh before I got into liquid nitrogen, I was always using your uh without cryo recipes, which helped a a tu a ton. But it it's one of those things where I don't even really understand the differentiation between cryo and non-cryo, like what steels it absolutely needs to have it because it's a fundamental um uh shift in the in in the you know the structures and carbides and everything, and what's not, like is it it is it dangerous to have a CPM 154 blade that is uh that is not cryoed um versus cryoed and things like that. But it that that gets into like the minutiae of the phone.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

Well, let's get into that one right now because you are perpetuating a myth. There's no such thing as a steel that has to have cryo, and there's no such thing as a steel that does not benefit from cryo. Everything is in degrees. So when you're talking about if you need cryo, we are talking about excess retained austenite. So you heat up the steel hot to quench it. It transforms to the phase austenite. This is a non-magnetic phase. So anyone who stuck a magnet to a piece of steel and saw it's non-magnetic, you are seeing that it's in the austenite phase. The atoms have rearranged themselves into a new arrangement, which is called phase-centered cubic, it's now austenite. When you quench rapidly, it transforms to martensite, the hard phase. And if it does not fully transform, there is some retained austenite. If you have too much retained austenite, the strength of the steel is reduced. You'll see this in a drop in hardness by ausinitizing too hot. And then you quench, you get too much retained austenite, and you didn't get peak hardness. Uh so this can seem like no big deal, you know, just don't temper it as much and you get the same hardness. But the steel, even if it measures at 60 Rockwell or whatever, if you have extra retained austenite, that will make the steel deform more easily for a given Rockwell hardness. So it'll behave like a steel which is several points softer on the Rockwell scale. So to avoid excess retained austenite, what you need to do is austenitize at a lower temperature. Because the hotter you austenitize, the more carbon and alloy is in solution prior to quenching, and the more stable the austenite is. So it requires lower temperatures to transform to martensite. And that's where cryo comes in. It gets you to a lower temperature to get more transformation. So a steel only needs cryo if you're osinitizing above a certain temperature. So 154 CM, CPM 154 is fine without cryo if you osinitize sufficiently low. And that is the case for any steel. Now, you cannot over-osinetize and not use cryo. And so sometimes I have recommendations where I only looked at liquid nitrogen. You know, I heat treated it, I quenched it, I put in liquid nitrogen, I made curves, I tested toughness, etc. And so sometimes my own recommendations I just have to guess, like, okay, probably 50 degrees lower will be okay. And uh, alright, what conclusion am I coming to now? So where cryo then matters also is if you want extra hardness. So you can't always temper lower. Eventually you'll be under tempering. So you need to use cryo. And so you can get a final as he treated condition, which is one or two points harder without much change to the other properties. You know, the toughness goes down a little bit just because you're at higher hardness. And some steels like Van X, LC200N, it's really hard to get above like 61 or 62 Rockwell with those. And without cryo, you're really limited to like 5960. So that's where you might say this steel needs cryo if you're unhappy with 59 Rockwell. But if you're happy with 59 Rockwell, they don't need cryo. So no steel needs cryo, uh, but it can help you for certain heat treatments.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

Yeah, well, I mean, thanks for clearing that up. Um, kind of a uh uh interesting question on that is it from the time that you heat treat a blade, I know that um there's some uh I guess conjecture on like how how long after you quench a blade to tempering it is uh is optimal, right? Can you like set it aside and wait till the next day? Um and I know it has a lot to do with the stress uh inside of the blade, but is there uh is there a optimal time once you've quenched to uh to liquid nitrogen or cryo treat things? Like is there is there a duration of time uh that I need uh that I have to have it within in order to liquid nitrogen?

SPEAKER_01 40:38

Okay, let's take things one at a time. Let's talk talk about time to tempering first, and then we'll talk about time to cryo because they are somewhat different questions. So almost any data sheet you read will say temper immediately after quenching. Sometimes it will say once you hit like 120 degrees Fahrenheit, then temper. 120 degrees is about when you can hold a piece of steel in your hand comfortably. So that's the rule of thumb that once you can hold it in your hand, you temper. Now the main reason for that is to avoid cracking. And so, especially with large intricate parts, uh they will tend to crack if they sit around untempered too long. Now, personally, I have never seen a knife blade or a coupon that I have heat treated fracture by sitting around too long. And so I think this is mostly not an issue with knife blades. Now, the data sheets all say to temper immediately. So it's hard to say, like, oh yeah, just let it sit around, it'll be fine. On the other hand, people recommend doing cryo for 24 plus hours all the time, and that's just sitting there untempered for that whole length of time. So you know, it's not like cryo magically makes it so it's not hard, untempered steel and won't crack. So if that's not a problem, then sitting around at room temperature is also not a problem. So uh I think it usually doesn't matter. Now the time between quenching and cryo does matter. The reason being that retained austenite will stabilize at room temperature. And there have been studies done where they've let steel sit after quenching before cryo for like an hour, 24 hours, then put it in cryo or a freezer or dry ice and seen how much austenite converts. And there's a huge difference. So with uh if you wait 24 hours, dry ice almost doesn't do anything. And waiting only an hour makes it so a freezer doesn't do anything. And even waiting 24 hours with liquid nitrogen will still result in like half the retained austenite being converted as you would have gotten by going in immediately. So, you know, the best for transforming austenite is a continuous cooldown. So you quench and then you put it in your liquid nitrogen or your dry ice right away, and that will lead to more complete transformation.

SPEAKER_00 43:23

Yeah, and that makes sense. Uh I I've actually had some issues recently with uh some Vegas forged Damascus. I think it's uh it's 440 C, and I forget what the other steel is, but um I had heat treated them and then got my Dura and liquid nitrogen and everything like several days later and uh and put in liquid nitrogen, and the the Rockwell testing was not any different uh from the initial quench when I tested it and after I liquid nitrogened it, but I mean it set you know, probably you know, four or five days uh in between those things. I I didn't notice much of a change in it. I imagine that. The difference between Damascus and uh or patterned weld steel and you know homogeneous monosteel is uh also a factor in how how I'm testing the rock wall hardness because it seems like some parts are harder than others.

SPEAKER_01 44:14

Well then, like we were talking about with the oscinitizing temperature, if you're at the lower range of osinitizing temperature, the bump in hardness from cryo will be very small, you know, like half a point, maybe a point. Where when you're getting to the higher temperatures, that's when you get the big jumps in hardness. And so, you know, maybe you were just on the lower end of oscinitizing where it doesn't change that much. That in combination with sitting around for a few days definitely would result in little or no change.

SPEAKER_00 44:42

Yeah. So I want to segue a little bit into talking about uh Apex Ultra, uh, since the you know, Magna Cut is your your introductory steel that you uh developed, right? But uh can you talk a little bit more about Apex Ultra?

SPEAKER_01 44:56

Yeah, Apex Ultra was developed along with two European guys, Tobias Hongler and Marco Gudemond. They're both kitchen knife bladesmiths, and they wanted a high hardness steel with good wear resistance that still had good toughness at that high hardness and was forgeable, uh, you know, could be normalized, annealed, etc. And they came to me with a couple of compositions and asked me to analyze them and tell them if it would meet their goals, you know, the their goals for the property combination that they wanted. And I said, these steels look fine, but I've had an idea, I had even mentioned the idea on an article pretty recently before they contacted me, which was to combine the best attributes of 52100 and the Japanese steel blue super into one steel. And so that's what we went forward with. And so they worked their connections and they were able to get a test melt made. We tested it, the properties were great. Then we went into larger production, again in Europe, using a special technology called Electro Slag Remelting, which is a cleaner steel, a finer microstructure steel. And uh we've been selling it. And uh the response has been good. It is trickier to work with than a simple steel like 1080 or 1075 or something. But for for the knife maker that knows what he's doing and can follow, you know, the instructions that we provided and some of the things to avoid doing, uh, it's a great steel. It has better edge retention, uh, good toughness at very high hardness, uh, though it's a very unique set of properties that weren't available before.

SPEAKER_00 46:36

So um with the composition of this steel, do you think that there's any uh real benefit to using this over some of the other like powdered steels or anything for like stock removal knife makers? Or is it or is it primarily uh used for the the forging um component of knife making and and having that um you know the the characteristics that you developed into the steel?

SPEAKER_01 47:02

I'd say its main benefits are for forging, but the toughness at high hardness was higher than other steels that I've tested. So if your goal is a steel to have good toughness at like 67 Rockwell, there may not be anything better. So, you know, a steel that's easy to sharpen that gets crazy sharp at high hardness for like kitchen knives and other fine-cutting knives, it might be the best choice. So if you're okay with corrosion or staining, I should say.

SPEAKER_00 47:36

Sure. Yeah, and I I think about it a lot for for bushcraft and everything, because you know, like when you're uh when you're using uh some of the uh lesser steels, I don't know if another word to actually call it, but you know, uh the the more uh available steels and you're you're using it for outdoor work and everything, you really kind of have to accept the fact that a uh 61 or 62 rock wall hardness is is it um and uh for for the uh toughness component of things. But it's interesting to me that if you can have the best of both worlds and use uh Apex Ultra for bushcraft and other outdoor knives and things that it might actually be uh highly compelling to use. So I'm interested when it when it becomes available in the United States, I see you have like a July or August of this year.

SPEAKER_01 48:25

Yeah, it has been available in the US in the past. Uh it's just you know, we're making this in batches, and so uh people are excited about the new steel, they buy it all up, and then we gotta wait for the next batch to come in. And so that's the period of time we're in right now.

SPEAKER_00 48:39

Yeah, good problem to have though, right?

SPEAKER_01 48:41

Yeah, sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 48:44

So uh I think that this is a perfect time to segue into your new book. So uh just released what it was on the 8th of May. It's a the story of Knife Steel, is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 48:56

Yeah, I don't I think it was three days ago. Time is a blur. So, you know, I was waiting on uh Amazon to approve it because it is published through Amazon's printing presses, and so you know, it had to be approved by the robots or the people. I don't know who approves it. It seems to be a weird process. So yeah, it was released three days ago. The story of Knife Steel Innovators Behind Modern Damascus and Super Steels by me, Dr. Laren Thomas.

SPEAKER_00 49:25

Yeah. Um, well, thank you for this book. I have it on order in hardback because when you mentioned that the uh the photos and everything were a better quality too for hardback, I was like, okay, I'm just gonna splurge a little bit on the book. I should have got the PDF so I could have read it before this. But uh something that's interesting to me uh is you know, at the in the in the 70s especially, uh there was this period of time with uh some some of the debate on steels and them being dirty, right? And I don't know that I've ever really gotten a good clarification from knife makers on what that means and why the shift from uh you know American steels to some Japanese steels and then uh Loveless's uh 154 CM and so on and so forth was like what what precipitated that to happen? But it's interesting to me that it seems like you cover a lot of those kind of topics in the evolution of knife steel. Um and I just kind of want to talk a little bit more about some of the content of the book, not spoiling it uh necessarily, but uh all those things really interested me.

SPEAKER_01 50:32

Aaron Powell Well, the book is 500 pages long, so I I I can you know we can spoil about 10 pages of the book over the course of this interview, and there will still be 490 pages left to read. So we don't need to worry about spoilers for the book.

SPEAKER_00 50:51

That is right. So uh can you talk a little bit about this uh that concept of dirty steel, what that means, and uh how that influenced like this the this evolution of new knife steels and uh new locales for uh knife steel manufacturing?

SPEAKER_01 51:07

Sure. So I just mentioned that Apex Ultra is made with ESR, Electro Slag Remelting, and that is a method of making steel to make it clean. So clean versus dirty is talking about impurities in steel. So impurities are things like oxides, uh phosphorus, sulfur, those are big ones. And so when you make clean steel, you're trying to eliminate those impurities in the steel because they will act as l small sites for cracks to initiate. Now, carbides do the same thing, those hard particles in steel that resist wear, they can also act as sites for cracks to initiate, but impurities is kind of like a a self-imposed issue in the steel. You know, if you can eliminate them, you can have a little bit better performing steel, even with the same carbide structure, the same composition. Now you're mentioning in the 70s and 80s, uh they started to say that 154 CM, which was the most common custom knife maker steel at the time, was dirty, they called it. And the the stories of this sound a little exaggerated, but some of the knife makers are talking about having like P-sized, you know, holes in the steel essentially, which sounds a little insane to me. So I don't know I don't know if those are all true. But they've also said that Crucible had moved away from producing the 154 CM with a process called VimVar, which is sort of similar to ESR in some ways in that it's a process for making clean steel. So Vim vacuum induction melting, that means they made the steel under vacuum, and then var vacuum arc remelting, where they remelt the steel also under vacuum, and having that double process VimVar makes the steel extra clean, uh, which it was produced for aerospace uh you know bearings and things. They wanted super clean steel because the cleanliness of steel, the impurity uh content, especially affects high cycle fatigue, which is not something we really need to worry about in knives, but high cycle fatigue meaning the bearings are running under millions of cycles, and eventually they crack under fatigue from millions of cycles. And that can happen from relatively small impurities that we really don't have to worry about with knives because we worry about low cycle fatigue and gross toughness. You know, like one good whack will take a divot out of an edge, or maybe ten good whacks, but not millions, usually. That rarely happens. So they're complaining about the dirty steel, Crucible isn't using Vimvar. They find ATS-34 in Japan, which is the same steel but made by Hitachi in Japan. And that steel is much cheaper, it's like half the cost of 154 cm, and it's available in thinner sizes, which is very important to knife makers. You know, if you're having to surface grind all of your steel down to 8th inch or 100 thousandths to use it, that's very costly. And so just buying it as straight eighth inch or hundred thousandths material makes it very appealing. So I do wonder if some of this was ad hoc reasoning, like, oh, we've got ATS34, it's half the cost, and in the size I want, that 154 CM, it was dirty stuff, like let's move on to the good stuff. Uh then 154 CM made a comeback in the late 90s when Crucible started offering it in sheets and good sizes again. They're like, hey, this is made in USA material. A couple of knife companies have gone to them, including Tony Marfion of Microtech, he went to Crucible and was like, let's get a made in USA steel in here. And 154CM made a big comeback at that point. But I'm almost positive that they are not using Vimvar on that stuff that they've made from the late 90s onward. And obviously there aren't giant impurities in it. So where did that impurity story come from? Was it real? Was it just a bad batch that Crucible made? That's still a mystery to me.

SPEAKER_00 55:11

Yeah, well, that's that's one thing that I I think that I will uh enjoy about reading your book is is the I I would say uh you might disagree with me, but you seem to have grown up as like a contrarian. Like uh people say certain things and you're like, hmm, I don't know if that sounds right. Let me research it, right? And this life that's been built uh of telling the story of fact versus fiction uh just seems to be built into your personality, right? I even see it on No, I'm not a contrarian. Dry humor. Uh but you know, like I I I there was uh a one instance where I was talking about something on a a heat treating group on Facebook, and you came in and said, no, that's actually not right. And I was like, oh man, maybe I should just keep my my my mouth shut and let Laren answer all the questions. But what's good about it is like now you're actually you're doing that in published form, and it's been you know, again, a humongous benefit. But um, I also wonder sometimes about you know, you hear these stories about dirty steel or uh in like unavailability or things, and I wonder how much of that is fact versus uh the like perception. And it's the same, the same type of situation with, you know, when I was getting into knives and uh learning about quenching and everything, some people are like, you know, you have to uh you know, you have to line your blade up with the with the magnetic poles in order to keep from uh you know warping it and so on and so forth, uh I guess quenching it in virgin's blood or cow's blood or whatever. And uh other people are like, you know, using mot use motor oil is the best or canola is the best in everything. And systematically you've been able to debunk those things. And to me, that is uh is it's highly beneficial to somebody like me, because I have all these questions, and you just naturally, throughout this osmosis of of trying to debunk things, have answered a lot of questions that I've originally had.

SPEAKER_01 57:09

Yeah, I've got a lot of different directions to go based on what you said. So the one is that, you know, debunking has been a long process, people before me, you know, during my time, and will continue after me. You know, many people have debunked things, and a lot of things that I am debunking are things that other people debunked. You know, so I can't claim all of the credit for that. So one thing that's covered in the Wayne Goddard chapter of my book is debunking packing, which was a common thing claimed by forging bladesmiths for decades, that you would forge the edge of the knife uh at low temperature at the end of the forging process, and that it would pack the molecules closer together. And this is mostly a dead theory, hypothesis, marketing point, uh, but it still comes up sometimes, and I'm like, wow, I can't believe you heard that from another knife maker. I thought it was long dead. So I mean, with this debunking stuff, it is a it's a cycle. You know, just like there are myths that never die about Bigfoot or whatever it is in the knife world, we've got our own myths, and we have to continue to debunk them, and it seems like they never fully die. There's always a little pocket in some random place where a bladesmith keeps teaching people about packing uh or quenching with the magnetic poles. But we have to soldier on and we explain to people what happens in this deal, what doesn't happen, and uh hopefully one day nobody talks about these myths. But until then we just have to do the best that we can. Uh now what else did I want to say? I made one of the three points I wanted to make, and now I have no memory of the other two points. So you'll have to ask another question.

SPEAKER_00 58:54

Well, I I think uh you know, in the interest of time and everything, uh I I may I'm I wanna what I want people to understand about uh this conversation too is like uh you have been able to expand the uh the realm of metallurgy and knife making uh through your passion. And I think that you know, people who really s uh adhere to uh your books and what you've done with knife steel nerds and everything who want to get into this, um, what are some recommendations for ways to start uh for the the newcomer into metallurgy or knife steals?

SPEAKER_01 59:31

Well, knife engineering is a really good introduction. It's a it's a big book, but it really doesn't have that many words in it. In fact, the word count of knife engineering is less than half of this new the story of knife steel. Uh just because there's a lot of pictures, a lot of diagrams, and so it's really pretty easy to read, or at least that's what the uh the five-star reviews on Amazon say. So uh, you know, I've had a data-driven approach. So you talk about being a contrarian. Really, it's not about disagreeing with people, it's like let's find the real truth. Let's do that through an understanding of the fundamentals and simple experiments. You know, does a freezer do anything for steel or does it have to be liquid nitrogen or dry ice? Let's just do the experiment. There's no need to have belief in here, or you know, my knife maker that taught me is better than your knife maker that taught you, and so I know. You know, we we don't have to include belief in this. Uh, and when it comes to correcting people on Facebook or forums, I really don't like doing it. I know I do do it sometimes. Um, you know, if someone's half wrong, a lot of times I don't get into the argument, or if someone's obviously, you know, just making their point and they want to have a big fight about it, I don't like to get involved. Now, if someone says something, it's clearly wrong and it's a relatively short explanation to say why, then sometimes I do insert myself, just like, okay, you know, this is a myth. It's easy to explain that it's a myth, and let's just, you know, let's get it out there.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:08

Yeah. Well, I mean, I I appreciate that. I think that on behalf of all uh knife makers, uh, thank you for your work. Um uh you can uh for anybody who's interested, uh you can find Laren's new book on Amazon. Uh you can buy it on through PDF, uh hardcover and paperback. Uh do you have anything like anything special you want to talk about your book on? I mean, I'm I'm actually there's there's so much to unpack about it. I mean, I've I've only looked at the the the content uh list that you have on each chapter, and I mean I'm kind of salivating to be able to read it, but I mean I'm kind of interested to know if you have any particular areas that you want to focus on or uh talk to as part of all these chapters that you have compiled.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:51

Yeah, well, one thing to mention is that the easiest way to get to the PDF copy is just through my website. Uh you can click on the article about the book, and then there's a link to PayHip, which is a service that sells you know digital products, in this case the PDF. So the PDF is a little cheaper than the paperback. I'm not a huge fan of digital copies, but you know, the book is not available in every country. Uh the book is pretty expensive to print because it's 500 pages in color. And so, yeah, the PDF is there if you want it. My favorite is the hardcover, as you mentioned, Aaron. Uh, because you know it's a little sturdier and it has what's called premium color printing, which just means the the color pictures look a little more contrasty, a little more vibrant than the paperback. The paperback is fine, it's not bad. I got a new paperback today, and I was actually surprised how good it does look, but the hardcover is better. Uh so but yeah, subjects in the book. The book uh you know, there there are books out there already about like ancient knives or like old Sheffield knives or buoy knives, or you know, there there are some books out there those were not the the subjects I wanted to retread. I was interested in the modern era, you know, like from 1900 or so to today. You know, what has happened in the knife world, you know, because what happened with Sheffield knives is only tangentially connected to the knife world today. Uh you know, what happened, what evolved to get us to here now? And so that covers both the steel history and the knife history. And so, you know, we go from production knives in the major companies like Camillus or Schrade in the early 1900s up to the more specialty knife companies like Buck and Gerber and Almar, and then the more modern extensions of those like Spiderco or Microtech. And the growth of the custom knife industry, which really did not exist until the nineteen seventies. There were a handful of custom knife makers before then, but the explosion of custom knife makers that all traces back to the early 70s.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:01

Yeah, I'm sp um actually really interested in your chapter on Alp uh Pendry and uh John uh Verhoeven's and like the uh the Woots Damascus or whatever, like what what are you gonna talk about there? I the only uh I I know that there's a few knife makers out there who actively try to uh make it and perfect it, but the um but there's only one reference I think otherwise to it um and there's a like a YouTube video or documentary that was done where Al Pendry was uh talking about, I guess there were scientists from the Middle East somewhere, I believe, uh, that came over and uh wanted to experiment with it with him. And there was some video that I watched on it, but I'm actually really interested in the the the history and what you've collected on it, so I can't I really can't wait to read your book.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:51

Well, one thing about the Wootz story, and this is you know, whenever I found these stories, I always included them in the book. There's several times in history when a metallurgist or scientist got together with a knife maker to discover something or develop something related to steel. And Woots is one of them. It's actually happened multiple times. So all steel was carbon steel back in the day. It was iron and it was carbon. There were multiple ways of making steel, but they all made steel with iron and carbon. In the late 1700s, early 1800s, the Europeans got real interested in woots made in India. It was this legendary material like how can we make something like this? So Michael Faraday, a famous scientist, got with James Stoddart a cutler, they call him, so a knife maker, owner of a knife factory, something like that. They wanted to recreate woots. So they analyzed Woots. You know, this is so early in steel, it was recently discovered that the difference between iron and steel is carbon. So this was a new discovery just a couple decades before. So, you know, they found that wootz is high in carbon, but they thought, okay, there's something special about this steel, we need to figure out what it is. So they started experimenting with adding different elements to steel. They tried a bunch of crazy stuff like platinum and gold and silver and stuff, you know, stuff that isn't even used in steel. But these were the earliest experiments in alloying of steel. It's all traced back to a knife maker and a m and a scientist getting together trying to recreate a legendary sword steel wootz. All steel alloying goes back to that moment. The rediscovery of Woots has been an area of research ever since. There's multiple people who have claimed to have discovered the method by which ancient Woots was made. The most recent and in my opinion, the most valid claim for this is by John Verhoeven and Al Pendre, again, a metallurgist and a knife maker together to recreate it. And Pendre had made Woots in the past, or made Woots like steel in the past. Uh, but it wasn't exactly like the ancient stuff. And John Verhoeven had tried to do some research, and he wasn't getting something he was exactly happy with that looked like the ancient material. And so the two of them got together, they experimented with a bunch of things, and they were able to figure out these new mechanisms for how the structure develops in the steel, you know, this Damascus pattern in a mono steel. And uh they published on it, they created patents, and they really figured out, you know, how it was made anciently.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:50

Yeah, that's uh fascinating stuff to me. Again, I I'm sure I will spend a lot of time reading and rereading your book. Um, you know, I I appreciate you uh uh coming on the show, Laren. Um I I will encourage everybody to buy your books and I will make sure that I copy those in our show notes. Uh but uh again, thanks for your time and thanks for your uh large contribution towards uh knife making and especially the custom knife making world because uh you save us time and a lot of bickering.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:20

Well, thanks for inviting me on.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:22

Yeah, no problem. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Good Old Blades Podcast. Remember that you are loved and God bless.