I have had nothing but problems with the 1095 from Admiral, and have heard horror stories from other makers about it. I also thought it was a good deal for the money, but have found it very difficult to work with and had several pieces with obvious alloy banding. I have had a billet just crumble under the hammer at orange/yellow heat.

I was having a dickens of a time trying to cut a Damascus billet and I posted a request for advice here: http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/index.php?/topic/2456-annealing-109515n20/

There was some very good input on getting it annealed. It doesn't necessarily come annealed from the factory, even when they say it does. Check out that thread and see what Kevin and Matt suggested for getting it annealed properly.

Nicholas

Admiral hot rolled 1095 is not annealed, it is hot rolled as is. I think the cold rolled 1095 is annealed.

I have used Admiral hot rolled 1095 and have not experienced any problems. After forging I do a high heat

normalize, then cycle two or three times, then anneal at 1200 - 1250 for one hour and air cool.

Anthony

I have a bar from some time ago that had a very pronounced segregation stringer running right down the center that was a gathering point for heavy carbide sheeting and even grain boundary eggshell effect if it wasn't normalized heavily enough to break it up. I believe batches like that one are what gave 1095 the undeserved bad reputation among knifemakers who were unfortunate enough to have got part of it. As I said it was some time ago so I do no know if it was indicative of the original sources quality control or if it was just a single bad run.

Bummer. I didn't want to badmouth a supplier or anything, I just wanted to know if it was a known issue. Now I have about 20 knives worth of stock that I'm going to have to anneal. Kind of a pain. All the other stuff I bought is sized for damascus and forging so I'm not as worried about it. But all the 1095 I got was for stock removal.