One way to pretty much get around the "ease of sharpening" issue is to just use diamond stones for everything.
I've never found 440V to be hard to sharpen but always use diamond stones. You can tote a diamond stone to the field just as easily as any other stone. I'm sold on diamond. Cry hard on initial purchase price and be done with it. That allows you total freedom in steel selection.
I rather like the aggressive, toothy edge I get with diamond anyway, since shaving hair off my arm super-cleanly isn't really the goal anyway, cutting stuff that needs to be cut (cardboard, rope, tape, packing bands, stuff in the yard, my fingernails, occasionally my finger....DOAP!) is the real goal. The diamond edge gets shaving sharp, sometimes hair poppin, but you can feel it pulling a bit, not what you'd want the barber (old days, eh?) to use.
Barbers and leather workers may have a need for a very fine, polished edge that cuts super cleanly, but I generally don't (and can strop my fine diamond-created edge on leather strop with some fine grit if I do).
Usually, shaving is for testing a sharpening job real quick (I'm not calibrated on paper yet) and for show.
And my guess is M2 is such a small performance difference (if not actually worse ... love the Goddard data, he uses identical knife styles of his own construct for testing, pretty darned consistent compared with most data you see) that for me personally, M2's tendency to rust more easily is not worth the occasional tiny performance difference. That's just IMHO.
If you need to cut metal or wire often, get the right tool....metal snips or wire cutters. If occasional, no problem with a CPM steel. Wire is nearly always dead soft anyway. If the blade is chipping, increase the angle of your sharpening job and give up on "hair poppin" escapades and settle for "shaves pretty clean" so your tool works (Viagra joke implied).
I have a 52100 hunting blade by Rick Dunkerly that I can get just super wickedly, hair jumpin', scary sharp, I mean just point it at a whitetail and the meat comes apart with no force, and this is a characteristic of good heat treats on most simple carbon steels. Dunkerly does a special triple heat treat/quench, get's super fine grain structure, and a VERY tough blade to boot. It'll rust even when I think I've got it wiped down very well and dry. Needs Sentry Tuf Cloth, so I use that, but hey, it's a compromise if you take it out into the boonies and use it for more than a day or a single task (rust on the edge leads to dullness). So I've given up on carbon steels for true working knives.
The CPM stuff (you'll hear more about 420V as the production makers learn the heat treat and start using it to avoid the minor brittleness problems with 440V, if my read of Phil Wilson's opinions is accurate) is so good, and can be made so sharp and wear resistant with diamond, it has my attention, and more to the point, my dollars back up my attention.
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rdangerer@home.com
