ApexUltra - I wish I knew this before I bought one!

we want it to be Apex Ultra the steel that is like the golden standard for handmade knife so what knives is Apex Ultra best suited for can you forge weld Apex Ultra is Apex Ultra easy to sharpen how can you heat treat Apex Ultra how is Apex Ultra better than other Steels how is it possible to develop a new steel when there is already 2 000 other Steels out there in this day and age Apex Ultra is a new type of Steel that has been developed specifically for high hardness Hand Forged handmade knives my name is Tobias hangler I'm part of the development team of Apex Ultra and I would like to give you some insights and some comments from my side as a maker as a metallurgist and as a user of culinary knives why I like Apex Ultra what is good about it what is new about it and maybe everything you need to know [Music] Apex Ultra is a new steel specifically developed for handmade High hardness knife so it's designed for the process of hand forging and it's designed for the possibilities that we have as Artisans as knife makers we developed Apex Ultra as a steel that is truly worthy of the work and the love that we put into handmade knives because often now you use Steels that are kind of used and developed for other Industries they're not specifically made for knife making and so you're always dealing with a trade-off we wanted to be Apex Ultra the steel that is like the golden standard for handmade knives it's a lower alloy design tool steel so it's not stain resistant it's not corrosion resistant it's a low oil alloy tool steel which we in the development team personally preferred as were Marco and I are both bladesmiths so we Forge a lot and we Forge a lot of culinary knives and in this Niche High hardness and lower eyelid designs can be very useful and are a joy to make and are a joy to use Apex Soldier was designed to have a very high Purity fine carbides and a very high hardness of the Matrix which will also give it very good toughness at the same time so it's developed to make it possible to have very thin bevels very fine angles at the edge and not to have any issues with micro cracking at the edge so it will have a decent toughness at very high hardness and it has fine carbides so you will actually have less work grinding it's still going to be a high hardness steel but it's not as bad as the Steels that have very high volumes of carbides which are bigger [Music] um the chemical composition of Apex Ultra was designed from the base of the steel 50 to 100 or 1.3505 in the German Norm which is currently one of the best purest available blade Steels but we saw some room for improvement if we are specifically looking at culinary knives and other knives that want the fine Edge and high hardnesses so we added some carbides tungsten carbides Vanadium carbides and tailored the composition of this new steel so it's actually forgeable Forge weldable that it is that it can be produced in an economic fashion the production is very easy uh is very important upscaling a product from laboratory size to Industrial size is a very difficult process and that can have a lot of dangers we reached the high Purity over a special processing not every steel has the same Purity there are impurities that come from the making of the steel and there's also not every steel is the same same homogeneity so for example construction steel will have a lot of dirt in it basically you can't usually see it with your bare eyes but if you look at it on the microscope it's there and a lot of the tool Steels that are used for the dye industry are also not the not the greatest really or also spring Steels can have fluctuating quality so we wanted the best rapix Ultra so we use a very high grade input materials and we try to get the best process for Apex Ultra so we also use Electro slag remelting which is an additional step which increases the price by a bit but it does just make the knife and make the steel so much better [Music] lectures like remelting basically takes out some of the impurities so you can imagine that you have a huge block of steel that is coming from the top there's a bath of slag in between and there's electrical current running through it which heats the slack bath and then the steel begins to melt in the top and it will drip down to the bottom and solidify again so this way you get a more homogeneous Steel in the in the bottom and part of the impurities will go into the slag and stay in the slack so you have a more homogeneous product you have finer carbides because the solidification rate is faster than in other casting methods and you will have less purities you will have less inclusions in your steel and these small inclusions are often where a crack will be initiated you know an edge is almost an Infinity in infinitesimally small object it leads to basically nothing so if you have high hardness here and there's just the tiniest inconsistency in the steel it will begin to break there and then the crack will grow further into the material so homogeneity and Purity are very important if we're talking about high hardness steels [Music] so what knives is Apex Ultra best suited for it is developed and is best suited for thin acute edges which need a high hardness so it has a very good balance between hardness and toughness in the upper hardness range so we are talking about the range of 65 HRC and upwards you can also use it below then you will have especially good Edge retention in comparison to other Steels because of the added carbide content we are talking about culinary knives razors woodworking equipment carving knives and many others really depends on what you're looking for and what and how you make knives [Music] can you forge weld Apex Ultra yes you can you can make send my Goma you can use it in the Mascus you need to be more careful it's not a beginner friendly Steel in forging and in Forge welding but it is very possible if you take some precautions work very cleanly it's best to weld all the edges shut I personally prefer MIG welding over TIG welding in this instance because it adds some soft steel around all the seams which will prevent cracking if you have Steels like 50 to 100 or Apex Ultra or other high hardness Steels with a little bit higher Harden ability and you just go over it with the tick torch without filler material so I'm basically talking about just fuse bonding you will very likely have Micro cracks in there one version if you only have a tick welder you can use a bit of filler material and you can preheat the steel to 1 to 200 degrees Celsius to avoid these micro cracks how is it possible to develop a new steel when there is already 2 000 other Steels out there in this day and age the knife industry has focused on high alloy tool Steels which were developed for slicing Edge retention mostly so we are talking about high chromium contents larger carbides or PM grades and there hasn't really been much development in the low alloy section four knives simply because there's not a huge industry behind it it's mostly artist blacksmiths bladesmiths knife makers so the larger companies that produce culinary knives did not really have an interest in that consequently in the field of low alloy tool Steels there has been little progression and there are many ideas left to be explored and Apex Ultra you can look at the technical data that we tested and I think that speaks for itself really [Music] who's behind Apex Ultra the development team consists of three people Marco goldiman who is a professional knife makers who makes wonderful culinary knives in Switzerland and he's also a trained Chef number two is Lauren Thomas you probably know him from knife steel nerds he's a metallurgist who is based in Pittsburgh in the U.S and basically just look up knife steel nerds if you don't know it already he has done phenomenal work he has a huge database of comparing different Steels he also tries to explain as much as possible from a metallurgists perspective the myths behind knife making and various topics that are very very relevant to you if you want to make better knives that actually perform really well and the third person is me my name is Tobias hangler I am an Austrian mythologist and bladesmith I have been full-time knife making for about two and a half three years now and before that I studied metallurgy at the University of lyom is Apex Ultra easy to sharpen the answer is yes despite the high hardness it is actually pretty easy to sharpen I use regular water stones you can sharpen it on pretty much any brand just take the usual precautions it is a little bit harder than other Steels but it will still sharpen on an aluminum oxide synthetic water stone or natural stones like the Belgian Blue for example why is that basically Apex Ultra is not designed to have a high percentage of carbides in it but the Matrix itself so the steel itself not the carbide in the steel provide the high hardness so there is less carbides which usually prevent abrasive wear and the high hardness steel itself is actually rather good to sharpen especially bird formation is very good it's very easy to stop so it's actually one of my favorite Steels to sharpen really it takes a very keen Edge and very easy to deburr and just phenomenal you can even use honing Rod if you really wanted to on apex Ultra it does work just be careful if you have a thin acute Edge and you have 68 HRC just be careful you know it's a very small contact area if you slice the knife along the honing Rod so be careful it does work I would probably rather recommend stropping leather if you're not like very familiar with honing rods and high hardness knives [Music] [Applause] how can you heat treat Apex Ultra just like any other low alloy tool steel you can use a variety of different methods how to heat treat Apex Ultra you will get different results but we've actually done quite a lot of testing and we've even gotten very good results out of a gas port for example so it is it has a pretty wide acceptable level if you strive for the best performance I personally would recommend the fluidized sandbed next best in my opinion would be an electric kill that is PID controlled you know have a temperature controller in there you know the temperatures but an induction heater will work you can also heat treat it out of a gas forge laryn Thomas has recently posted a video about what you have to do to get good results out of a gas Fort so in general Andy has also done some testing on apex Ultra so be sure to check that out on his page and think about the process and it's very important that that you also do the steps before the hardening so it's not all about the austenization make sure you have the right structure in the metal already beforehand [Music] how is Apex Ultra better than other Steels in general we say if hardness goes up toughness goes down there are very few things that actually allow an increase in both one of them is a fine grain you can achieve that by a proper heat treatment the two other things are Purity and homogeneity and we've taken a lot of care to make sure that the product that you get is very pure and has a homogenous structure also of course the alloy composition plays a role in that so when you're Heat Treating the grains don't grow too easily we have some carbides for carbide for grain boundary pinning so the grains don't grow very fast also the chromium helps in controlling how much carbon is in solution Apex Ultra basically makes it easy for you to get a good heat treatment as long as you take the usual precautions foreign [Music] Ty important to the steel basically the weakest point in the knife will form the crack there first so if you have a wide Speck where your strength in the material is because you have a not a very pure material because there's some dirt in there even if it's just a few thousands of the whole percent of the whole volume one point will be at the edge and if it only can reach up to this strain and not up to this strain it will form the crack first and once you have a crack it goes into the material and afterwards the growth is very easy and that's a bad thing about cracks so actually your weakest point will be the one that decides how strong your material is just like in a chain you know this the weakest chain link is going to decide how much your chain can take so that's why Purity is very important in very simple words basically [Music] the same thing counts for homogeneity so again the weakest point will decide how much your steel can take when it breaks if you know what the perfect composition is you don't want a wide field of variance around that you want to be as close as possible to this field of the composition of what the steel is actually made of so the more homogeneous The Better Properties you will get in total foreign making and Heat Treating is a lot about getting a fine grain getting A fine grain is one of the few things that will have you that will give you actually higher hardness and higher toughness or that can increase the combination of both in Apex Ultra we've designed the yellow in a way that you will have very fine carbides which prevent the grains from growing if you don't heat it up too far so in the typical area where you will be Heat Treating these carbide will be present they will be small precipitates and those will pin the grain boundaries and will prevent the grain from growing if you go higher in temperature more and more of these carbides will dissolve so in the typical forging temperatures of 1000 1100 degrees Celsius those carbides will be mostly in solution and therefore make your forging easier this is part of the design of Apex Ultra most of the carbides are soluble in the range of the forging temperature but that they will will be precipitated as small carbides that will have grain pinning effects during heat treatment which is kind of cool [Music] so when we talk about the carbide size large carbides have an advantage and smaller carbots have an advantage with Apex Ultra we've decided to go for very small carbide because we want to have a high overall hardness and a good toughness if you have larger carbides those will be very good for abrasive wear you can imagine like a huge rock in a matrix of softer material if something slides on top that is hard enough to Shear off steel but not hard enough to Shear off the car but these larger carbides in the steel will prevent the abrasion which is why High alloy Steels with very high carbide contents will perform pretty well in Katra test resulting so slicing at retention basically it's abrasive wear you cut through sandpaper almost so for example D2 has pretty good Edge retention in this test the balance between hardness and toughness is not great because these carbides again are not as tough as the steel surrounding it it basically makes it easier to in initiate a crack if there is a high load on the steel so these carbides are basically like impurities they are a faster way to initiate the crack for culinary knives and razors and other blades the smaller carbines are more advantageous because they as we said they prevent grain growth during heat treatment and they will also provide a good wear resistance in the general use that we have we don't usually cut sandpaper with our culinary knives we're working on a chopping board we're cutting vegetables so the hardness so the hardness is actually important that we can support a thin acute Edge so it doesn't roll over you know a soft steel if you do a shallow angle it will just roll over the top so we need High hardness to support this fine angle and at the same time we need enough toughness so it doesn't break so we don't get tipping so where can I get Apex Ultra one of the best places to get Apex Ultra is from knife material.at knife material that 80 keeps stock of all the Apex Ultra that you're gonna need including the laminated versions for stock removal knife makers they also keep the knife Vice Pro which is excellent for handling shaping and finishing your knife handles especially when you're cleaning out the glue or the epoxy from the handle so our friends that Forge they also keep stock of scalex protective coating which reduces scaling and decarb when forging blade a variety of sizes of black corduroy knife cases anything from 25 centimeters to 40 centimeters and of course they've got a decent range of handle materials including G10 scales in a variety of thicknesses and different colors as well check out their website so you can download the Apex Ultra technical data sheet but also you can get precise information on how to heat treat Apex Ultra all the links are in the description below thank you to knife material.80 for sponsoring this video thank you if you want to know more about Apex Ultra just go to our homepage there's the full data sheet you can also visit knife steel nerds from Lauren Thomas he has done some testing on apex Ultra I think it's perfect because he has a very wide range of test results of all different Steels that are used in life making and we have very intentionally done the same tests on apex Ultra with the same machines same specimens same as everything so that you can compare the data and it can make your own pretty much unbiased decision if you want to use apixel drone I hope you enjoyed the video I hope I could clarify some of the things about Apex Ultra if you have any other questions let us know in the comments you can also go to the profile of Apex Ultra on Instagram follow the latest news be updated on new batches at the moment we're still ramping up production so it might not be available everywhere but be assured that we're working on it and we want to have this steel available for everybody who wants it in the future and in the long run noise I hope you enjoyed that video about Apex Ultra if you're interested in comparison of different heat treatment systems check out this other video over here

Channel: UK Bladeshow

Views: 14,200

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Id: r3uYR6Mdmjg

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 02 2023