Thanks guys,
My question wasn't "where can I find the Ultimate Kitchen Knife" it was really just where can I find something a bit better and interesting to experiment with. I don't have any AUS-8 knives now and it seemed relatively good to experiment with as a kitchen knife.
I get most of my good kitchen knives at garage sales and Goodwill these days. Since I like to sharpen, this is not only cheaper, it is more fun. Yesterday I stopped at a Goodwill where I thought I might find some MAC knives to play with. What I found instead was a set of 3 Spyderco kitchen knives with MBS-26 blades! You can't imagine my surprise and delight, even though the store wanted a full 95 cents each for the knives.
They are all roughly chef's knife contoured, two with smooth edges while a medium sized one is serrated. The serrations will take real work to clean up and the smooth edges are real dull.
I sharpened the smaller smooth edge last night. It was pretty tough. It seemed pretty high in rockwell. As I worked, it just kept getting sharper! There's a point where most knives plateau and stop getting any sharper, this MBS-26 doesn't seem to understand the phenomenon. By the time I got to my fine ceramic rods it shaved better than any kitchen knife I had except for the Russell Green River carbon steel. After I stropped it with the green buffing compound it reminded me of a straight razor.
That is an amazing material. When I look at the alloy components it doesn't look special. I assume there is something very special in the mechanical and thermal processing of the blades to make it work like that.
Thanks for the suggestion Sal.