Category: Knives — 22
How to choose a steel and not overpay
If the whole conversation about steel grades comes down to one observation, it is an unpleasant one: the grade of steel is not the most important parameter of a kitchen…
S90V, S110V, K390, 10V: Exotica and What It Costs
The far end of the catalogue works like this: the higher a steel sits in the list, the fewer knives exist in it. That is not a conspiracy among makers…
D2, SKD11 and CPM CruWear: the semi-stainless middle
Between “stainless” and “carbon” steel there is a band that neither label fits. D2 is its best-known representative. It has about 12% chromium, so formally it passes the definition of…
CPM S30V, S35VN, S45VN: Steel Invented Specifically for Knives
Almost all knife steel is borrowed. It was developed for bearings, dies, cutting tools, medicine and aviation, and knifemakers then took whatever was at hand and happened to fit. The…
154CM, ATS-34 and CPM-154: one steel with three biographies
In price lists these three names sit side by side and are regularly passed off as one another. Their chemistry is the same: 154CM is the original American steel, ATS-34…
The 440 series and 420HC: what hides behind a cheap stamp
A “440” stamp on a blade is not a grade but a family, and the spread inside it is wider than the distance between the family and its neighbours. Knowing…
N690 and Its Shelf Neighbours
N690 is a martensitic stainless steel with cobalt, made by Böhler-Uddeholm. In the kitchen world it is less well known than the Japanese grades with the word “gold” in their…
M390, Elmax and the Other Austrians
Böhler-Uddeholm AG is a steel group, one of the world’s leading suppliers of high-grade tool steel. Sheet steel, tubes, wire, forging equipment, gas turbine components, FOX welding electrodes. Plants in…
Sandvik 12C27, 14C28N and Nitro-V
Sweden does not make knife steel for knives. Sandvik rolls thin strip, and the grades the knife world knows as 12C27 and 13C26 started life as a product for razor…
X50CrMoV15 and 1.4116: The Steel Half of Europe’s Kitchens Are Made Of
If there is a European knife in your kitchen that you did not buy in a boutique, it is very likely made from this steel. It is also what hides…
AUS-8, AUS-10 and Other Japanese Workhorses
Between a knife from a twenty-euro block and a Hattori at 600 euros lies the range that covers roughly everything people actually cut with. Japanese metallurgy fills it densely, but…
ZDP-189: A Steel That’s Hard to Sharpen and Easy to Ruin
ZDP-189 is a Japanese powder steel from Hitachi with an extremely high content of carbon and chromium: 3% carbon and 20% chromium. Besides these, the composition includes molybdenum, vanadium, tungsten,…
SG2 and R2: Japanese powder
Let us start with the confusion over names, because here it is the main issue. SG-2, R2 and SGPS are one and the same steel. SG-2 is the maker’s designation,…
VG-10 and Its Relatives from Takefu
Takefu Special Steel is a steelmaker from the city of Takefu, Fukui Prefecture. That is where VG-10 was developed — specifically for Japanese kitchen knives, not for bearings, dies or…
Aogami and Shirogami: Hitachi’s White and Blue Paper
Hitachi Steel Ltd. — or more precisely its knife division Yasuki Hagane, also known as YSS, Yasuki Specialty Steel — has supplied Japanese forges with steel in ingots for decades.…
Damascus: What Gets Sold Under That Word
Damascus steel is not in fact a type of steel. It is a method of manufacture and, in the overwhelming majority of cases on a kitchen shop shelf, a method…
Alloying Elements: Who Does What
The list of alloying elements is the dullest part of any conversation about steel and at the same time the only part that shows why grades behave differently. Before the…
Powder metallurgy: where the super stainless steels came from
Powder metallurgy did not appear for the sake of knives and was not solving a knife problem. But it is what shifted the limit that knife steel had been hitting…
Stainless steel: what chromium actually does
It is convenient to talk about stainless steel as if it were one substance with one property. In fact it is a collective name, and the property is conditional. Technically,…
Carbon Steel: Why People Still Choose It
By definition, carbon steel is steel with a carbon content between 0.05% and 2.1%. In practice, makers rename anything that is not stainless steel as carbon steel for convenience. That…