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| Steve Elliott - CPM 3V |
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| Finest abrasives. | ||
| Microbevels front and back. | ||
| Use a jig. | ||
| Copyright (c) 2002-12, Brent Beach |
The Blade
Steve Elliott is a fellow plane blade tester. He has made a number of blades from an exotic steel named CPM 3V. CPM stands for Crucible Particle Metallurgy - which the manufacturer says are "high performance alloys ... produced by a powder metallurgy process". The main alloying components are: Carbon 0.80%, Chromium 7.50%, Vanadium 2.75%, Molybdenum 1.30%.This is a 2" wide blade, which I tested in a Stanley #604-1/2. The blade is too thick, at 0.13", to use in most planes, but by moving the frog back was just able to work in this plane.
The Test
May 21-22, 2006.As with all my other tests, I honed three front and back microbevels using 15, 5, and 0.5 micron 3M abrasive paper.
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The front bevel, 200 X magnification, after sharpening.
The right half is the primary bevel. The microbevels are, from left to right:
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The front bevel, 200 X magnification, after 100 passes along 4 foot douglas-fir board. The microbevels are numbered as before.
The wear bevel is very hard to see. If you look right at the edge though you can see a faintly darker line. |
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The front bevel, 200 X magnification, after 200 passes.
By enlarging the picture (digitally) I can see that the wear bevel is about 4 pixels wide. |
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The front bevel, 200 X magnification, after 300 passes.
By enlarging the picture (digitally) I can see that the wear bevel is about 5 pixels wide. |
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Bottom Line
The CPM 3V blade is comparable to most HSS M2 blades, except the Academy Saw Works blades of recent manufacture.At the end of the test the edge was defect free.