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reswright
3851
Apr 21, 2019
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also: "It seems that if there is so much to brag about by saying my knife has a (blah blah, useless letters and numbers) blade, then they should all use the same kickass steel."
Silly, isn't it? Let them brag tho, most of us do it from time to time and it's a good reminder that when it comes your time, there's always someone listening that's gonna be less impressed than you. Truth is, a lot of EDC stuff is bought for vanity and bragging rights and a lot of it's marketed using the same sort of insecurities that lead people to want to brag in the first place. Another way to say it is that very few lives will ever hang on whether someone bought a less expensive pocketknife steel or, by going with a titanium flashlight, saved pocket weight. Kitting out with the contents of Batman's utility belt is kinda dorky for most people. but it's ok that it's dorky. A lot of fun things are, and sometimes it's even useful. So what you're most contending with is human silliness, not metallurgy.
The steel designations? Yeah, they're kind of useless. Most of us can recognize certain things from some designations, that's about it. Steels beginning with CTS are Carpenter steels, a US group. Steels beginning with CPM are made by Crucible, another American company (edit; I thought I’d read they were partially foreign owned now, but can find no evidence that it’s so.)
P or PM often indicates that it's a particulate steel, which means the alloying agents are distributed very evenly during the process of making the steel, with fewer impurities. The steel usually has improved qualities as a result.
V and N and Mo and Co can indicate the presence of vanadium and nitrogen and molybdenum and cobalt in the alloy == all kinds of other things get alloyed into steel, the main effects of which are either to form edge making carbides or to give the steel some other property like spring or corrosion or abrasion resistance.
Steels that are just a four or five digit number, a letter and a number, or a number with a decimal point in it, are usually some sort of old school steel that you will need to oil, like D2, and occasionally a new school steel you’ll also usually need to oil. Steels beginning with a number and then 'Cr' are chromium steels, which resist rust better than high carbon knife steel or tool steel, but lose an edge in short order. Steels beginning with a number and C are carbon steels, the opposite. Generally speaking the higher the number in front of the Cr or C the better quality, but there are exceptions.
Steels with names like 'Aogami Super Blue' and 'Sleipnir' and 'Elmax' and 'Maxamet' and 'Cru-Wear' do not leverage some deeper information most ppl lack, they're just marketing terms chosen to sound badass. Everything usually means SOMETHING but especially with numbers it can be whatever they like. And again -- most people have a much harder time than they expect to have in telling the premium steels apart from one another. M390, 20CV and 204-P are virtually identical in their chemical composition. With real diligence- i.e. the willingness to make thousands of cuts to different kinds of material, and then closely examine the blade — those three will eventuallly come out ahead of S30V, S35VN, XHP on everything but ease of sharpenability and will do better in the round than ZDP-189, S90V, S110V, M4, or Elmax. But the truth is, almost nobody cares enough to test it that far. It gets really tiresome. Even old school knife guys who grew up around knifemaking have to send stuff off to be tested in labs.
Doesn't stop them or any of us from having a preference.
But the truth is that the vast majority of these knives are not built because someone thought that these were the absolute best materials they could find. They are built to be or appear valuable enough to be sold for a profit to people who want a knife. And the vast majority of these knives are not bought because someone understands exactly what they're buying, any more than they can name every part of every machine they own. They are bought because people want them. And they'll be prepared to declare whatever brand they bought The Best not because it is, but because they bought it. That's the kind of monkeys we are from time to time.
And the worse truth is that people who make knives are sometimes... bad people who make things with inferior materials, even though they know very well they're making cheap things from crappy stock and planning to sell them as premium to the masses. That 'Damascus' craze we just had that was mostly just pattern welded or etched steel? No one in the industry thought that stuff was any good, they just thought it looked wicked enough to sell. a lot of the 'damascus' was junk steel pattern welded together and given a simple etch and sold for a lot more than junk steel is worth.
Same thing with titanium. There's a lot of cheap and comparatively heavy titanium alloy sold and made into knives and people pay extra for the titanium, not knowing that it's not up to the usual standard and a lot heavier than it ought to be. (On the flip side I've bought 'titanium' parts that I could bend with my hands. Watch the industry long enough and you'll lose track of the number of cheap cop outs you see). Either way a wink is as good as a nod to a blind man - a lot of consumers never know the difference, after a while they just go 'huh i don't see what the big deal is about titanium' and go on to the next thing they wanna buy.
(Edited)
reswright
3851
Apr 24, 2019
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fhoodYes. Damascus can be jaw dropping stuff. But when you go looking to see what the steel is and it just says ‘Damascus’, that’s like when cheap knives just say ‘stainless’. Bit of a O RLY. Saying that the knife industry knows how to put its best foot forward is understating it; so if there’s any doubt?there is no doubt. ;)
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