If you ask many of the steel snobs around here, they'll often look down their rarified noses at 12c27. It's not the next-phase, new-wave, dance-craze steel. But, I'm fond of pointing out that it's one of only a handfull of steel alloys ever developed specifically for knives. Most of the other steel alloys people fawn all over were actually developed for something else and just tend to work for knives too. This explains the endless search for the ideal knife steel alloy.
While I certainly don't want to call it a dead field, metalurgy, at least the metalurgy of steel, is a few well-known discipline. They've advanced beyond the point of "let's try some of this, a little of that, and pinch of that other stuff and see what kind of steel we get" to being able to design and formulate a steel alloy to meet specific requirments.
So, why doesn't somebody sit down and design and forumalate the ideal blade steel? The answer is what the answer often is: money. Developing and producing a special steel alloy costs money. When big customers come along and say, "if you make it, we'll buy the stuff by the train load," then a steel company can justify that expense. When a specific customer (often aerospace or defense) say, "We need an exotic, specialty steel. We're not going to buy much, but we'll pay dearly for what we do," then a steel company can justify the expense of developing a new specialty alloy.
But, for the most part, steel companies try to produce "middle-of-the-road" or "multipurpose" alloys that they can sell to many customers and engineers design products around those steels.
The knife industry is actually fairly small as industries go and it's price-sensitive too. So, we don't have the demand or the dollars to interest a steel company in developing an alloy specifically for us.
So, we use alloys that were developed for other purposes. None is ideal for knives. And that leads to the "alloy of the month club" effect as folks try one alloy after another. Yes, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.
Sandvik did develope several alloys including 12c27 specifically for knives. While they've fallen out of fashion in the US (more because of fashion than because of performance), they remain very popular for knives in Europe.
Why did BM select 12c27 for the Model 42? I wasn't there. But, maybe it has something to do with experience. BM had used 12c27 for Bali-Song blades for many years with good results. Inasmuchas they were chaning so many other things when they went to the 42, the piviot and latch pin designs, the handle material, adding the latch gate, etc., that they felt like they didn't want to introduce another variable. I could see that.
I have also been told that 12c27 is not as brittle as some of the modern alloys like ATS-34. That would be desirable for a knife that might get dropped frequently.
It will not surprise me to see BM move away from 12c27 in the future now that they've got the rest of the 42 working well if for no other reason that the 42 is the only product in their line still using it and they probably don't want to have to purchase and stock it just for that one knife.
But, in conclusion, 12c27 is a good steel for blades. It was specifically formulated for blades. And, BM's many years of experience shows that it is a good steel for balisong blades.
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Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.balisongcollector.com
