Other uses of popular knife steels...

[jay2pointoh]

Well, of course we know S30V and VG-10 was specifically made for knives. What other applications are there for the steels we see in knives nowadays?

You know like industrial uses and other mechanical things.

 

[sweet_hitch-hiker]

1095 is like leaf spring steel i believe, my father has a pair of tin snips made of m2 which is technically not a knife.

 

[J.Davey]

I think 154CM was originally made for use as jet engine blades or something to that effect.

 

[Jason B.]

Yep, 154cm was used for the blades of a jet engine, D2 is used in punch presses, 5160 leaf springs.

If you look at CPM's web site it lists the steels uses. Most of our super steels are used where rapid wear of a part is not wanted or where the surface of a mold/dye needs to stay consistent over long periods.

 

[A.P.F.]

BG-42 was originally a Ball-bearing steel used in jet turbines, as I recall.

 

[singularity35]

52100 for ball bearings and ball bearing races.

 

[Dorito Monk]

The first time I encountered A2 and O1 tool steels was, well...in tools.

Veritas makes just about all of their plane irons out of these two steels, offering a choice between the two for most models. I still haven't tried a knife in A2 or O1, but I have used woodworking tools with both steels.

 

[Phydeaux]

We used to use 440C for tooling at a medical device company. We had some punch and dies to cut Tyvek for our packaging.

We also had some custom pins that rode in a Rulon (Teflon like material) made of hard chrome plated 440C. This part of machine had to be steam sterilized.

Ric

 

[Gator97]

As it is, for most of the steel alloys, knife is the "other use", since they were developed for different purposes and happen to work well(to various degree) in knives.
Out of ~2500 steels in the knife steel chart, about a dozen were specifically designed for knife blades, that's it. Everything else is mainly tool steels of various grades, some have been around for almost a century, although really weird things, like very low carbon construction steels can also be found as blade material too.
Check the attached notes in the chart, for bunch of them info on primary use is included.

 

[Nebulae]

dont forget there are allot of industrial knife applications too.

 

[Gator97]

I think those are more of "cutters" or cutting tools, most of them don't even look like knives But yeah, majority of tool steels are for that.