I have been seeing a disturbing number of comments around the internet saying something like the following: “Larrin says that 60 Rc MagnaCut has better corrosion resistance than 64 Rc MagnaCut, so there are different hardness levels for different applications.” I have never said such a thing. It is true that there are different levels of hardness for various applications, but hardness does not dictate corrosion resistance; therefore, it is not one of the parameters by which they would make this decision. I have a video where I have talked about the pros and cons of higher and lower hardness. How you heat treat a given steel can affect its corrosion resistance but a whole range of hardness values can be achieved with both good or bad heat treatments. I will give a variety of examples for this. A separate but related topic is about how hard different steels can be heat treated to when related to their corrosion resistance. For example, the very corrosion resistant Vanax and LC200N top out around 59-61 Rc. I will explain why they don’t get any harder and why this is partially due to those steels having very high corrosion resistance.
As always, Larrin makes the complex understandable. At least mostly.
Read the whole thing at KnifeSteelNerds.com
Corrosion Resistance vs Hardness in Knife Steels
Or you can watch the video:
Read the full article here