A friend of mine who has a large rock saw gave me a couple of old blades to play with. I can't find out for sure what the steel in the body of the blade is. The most common used types seem to be L6 and 1050. As is, the steel seems to be hardened to about the mid 50s-a HRC 59 blade scratches it, but skates a little. It throws a lot of orange sparks that split at the end of their trails. It has a slightly bluish-gray cast to it after buffing. Eventually I am going to heat treat some and see what hardness I can get out of it.

For now, though as an experiment, I cut off some pieces from the rim of one blade (14" dia. diamond blades) and decided to grind a bevel along the arc of one edge and use the diamond impregnated rim as the cutting edge. The matrix metal holding the diamonds is not extremely hard, but seems tough and with the diamonds is very wear resistant. It has a slight yellowish tint and does not spark. I wore out two new 80 grit cubitron 977 belts putting a bevel on the first one. The rim is about0.09" thick and the steel behind it is .05"-.06". I suspect this rim matrix is a nickel alloy.

Anyway, just for grins I am making a few up for kitchen knives. They have 4-5" long by up to 2 1/2 " wide blades and make slicers that look like a cross between a chefs knife and an ulu blade.

Has anybody got a better idea of what these metals are?

Stellite is a yellowish metal and very wear resistant. It's impact resistance would make a nice matrix to mount diamond in.

Try deliberately rusting the material with a little muriatic acid, it will not affect stellilte.

George,

The blades are somewhat rusty, but the edges are not. How does stellite cut with a cutoff wheel? I use an offset grinder to cut out the blanks. This stuff cut fairly well, but the wheel tended to grab whenever I hit the rim from the steel side. In fact it snatched the grinder out of my hands once. I was more careful after that.

Boy, wouldn't that make a hell of an edge-diamond impregnated stellite? The diamonds are sparse, as the blade was worn out, just a few percent of the surface area and are in the 200 micron size range.

You can cut stellite slowly with a grinder but you cannot saw it or drill with anything short of a carbide bit. It is stain proof because it contains no iron at all.