Titanium/Teflon plating high speed steel

Alright, my interest is blades. I'm partial to high speed steel. I have seen sites that sell high speed steel drill bits with titanium coating, advertising a rockwell of 102. Now, I'm not hoping to achieve this, but I'm wondering if there's a way to plate the high speed steel knife blades I make with titanium ( 6-6-2 or better preferably though I understand that might not be possible) and ...( I know this is getting long) possible even place a Teflon coat on over the titanium ?

I have access to fairly complete shop. Would be deeply grateful for info on this.

Thanks,

Hello Matthew!

The high speed drill bits are actually coated with Titanium Nitride, not titanium. You CAN sputter coat with titanium, but it is usually a stupid idea because it can give you a soft, easily galled layer without corrosion resistance, a bozo combination. I've only used it to satisfy some specsmanship issues on spacecraft applications.

You can certainly get the blades TiN coated, or CrN coated to provide a bit more corrosion resistance, or ZrN coated, to make it look golden, or combinations of those. These are all Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) processes, done in a vacuum chamber. Richter Precision have done a fine job for me: give them a call, and they'll tell you all about what PVD can, and can't, do.

The Rockwell C reading of 102 is bogus, however; they've taken a microhardness reading of the coating and invalidly converted it to a Rockwell C, by incorrectly assuming a linear correlation. It ain't so. It is hard, harder than the Rockwell C scale goes, but still. . .

Good luck!