[William P]

so, picked up deepekas primus line rondel dagger,

like many others reviews, it looks amazing.
http://deepeeka.in/15c-rondel-dagger.html

looks amazing, feels great, handle feels a tad heavy compared to blade, with blade being so short and relatively thin and narrow (i know one example of these kinds of daggers is much longer, 530mm in total length)

the blade however is not perfectly straight it is slightly off, the cross section is squashed close to the makers mark

but what im really curious about is the blade steel, and the hardness of said steel since i want to sharpen the tip up to that lovely armour piercing point.

[Dan Howard]

The steel used in these items is completely random because it is recycled. Sometimes it is pretty good but other times it is rubbish. A spark test is the easiest way to determine the type of steel.

[Dan D'Silva]

This one? KoA advertises it as EN45. Not bad, from what I've read -- if that's correct.

You could always try sharpening it, to get some idea how hard it is. The only reason I could think of to not do so would be if you knew that the heat-treatment was poor, you might want to leave its current finish unmarred and the blade blunt so as to make it a little safer as a purely display piece.

[Jean Thibodeau]

A very rough idea of the heat treat can be evaluated with a fine toothed metal working file, if the file skates on the blade without biting with a light touch it's probably at least somewhat heat treated. If the file does bite using more pressure one can sort of see if it bites a little or a lot ?

Keeping in mind that a file is usually much harder than a tempered blade, on steel quenched but not yet tempered the steel should be as hard or harder than a file, but this isn't the case with a finished blade that has to be tempered so as to not be as brittle as a piece of glass so it will be softer than the file.

I think there exists sets files of varying hardness that can be used in some order to get a more precise estimate of the hardness of a blade.

Now if the file does bite there is the problem that the file may damage the finish of the blade ..... So probably just using the light pressure option to see if the file skates or not ?

Well, at the very least you may be able to tell if the blade is dead soft or not ?

This is what I would try, I'm not saying that it's very precise or scientific.

[Lin Robinson]