I heard a story on the radio some time ago about a charity that gives grants to drug companies to develope new drugs for obscure and rare diseases. In many cases, developing a drug for a disease isn't that difficult. But, if there aren't many people suffering from that condition, then the market for any drug that might be developed is to small to justify the expenses of not only developing the drug but getting it approved and into production. In the mean time, the suffers of those afflictions have to make do with drugs formulated originally for other purposes. The story gave one example of an obscure nerve disfunction that blocked some nerve functions. There's about 200 cases of it in the US. The condition is well understood. Researchers basically knew what the drug to treat it needed to be. But, it took almost a million dollars to develope that drug, do all the testing, and actually get in on the market. No drug company would do it since the potential to even break even much less make a profit was not there with only 200 potential customers, and once they are cured, new cases are discovered at only a few per year. The market was just to small. But, with this charity paying half the costs, the drug was developed and is a great success (though even with the grant, it still ends up costing something like $30,000 per patient to cure the disease).
Developing a steel alloy is an expensive undertaking too. While we may think quite highly of them, knives are actually a very small, obscure market for metal suppliers. I'd bet money that General Motors scraps more pounds of metal each month than Benchmade, Spyderco, and throw in a few more if you like combined use in a year.
The steels we know and love for blades where, for the most part, developed for other applications. The TS in ATS-34, for example, stands for Tool Steel. ATS-34 is a tool steel developed to make machine tools out of.
This is, perhaps, why there isn't an "ultimate" alloy out there. Until some charity will pay the cost of developing an alloy for us, we've got to just make do with steels originally formulated for other applications.
The Sandvik alloys are different. They were actually originally formulated for knives and razor blades. Not surprisingly, they work pretty well.
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Chuck
Balisongs -- because it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!
http://www.balisongcollector.com
