"Super Steels" for Knife Blades?

goodeyesniper said:
You just proved my point :p I don't necessarily think it's wrong or right to name it one way or the other. Ten years ago people would probably have taken offense to you not calling it a super steel, just because there are a lot of steels which leave it in the dirt now is it no longer a super steel? It's up to you to decide.

IMO It's still a high alloy powder steel, which leaves steels like 154cm in the dust with its edge retention, so it fits the bill of a super steel in my book.

Just because the Silver Surfer could vaporize Spiderman in a millisecond, is Spiderman no longer a super hero?
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That depends........We talking about movie spiderman, or comic book spiderman :p
 
Post 35 from James Terrio makes an excellent point. Steel choice and heat treatment need to be matched to the intended use. As is also pointed out elsewhere in the thread the harder the steel, generally speaking, the more brittle it will be. Thus it looks to me like there is a ongoing battle between edge retention in normal use and edge damage potential from twisting or hitting hard iitems. Per my understanding the same is true of ceramic blades. Very hard but brittle.

I have learned quite a bit from this including that there are a wide range of opinions on what is a super steel and I suspect that for some uses a much less exotic steel may be what is wanted.
 
In my kitchen, a knife has to suffer no damage from being dropped into a sink from about a foot up. And that's a real-world test, unfortunately... I could never get away with Ankerson's S110 blade, I'd be crying by the end of the week.....
 
My favorites are the S90v and CTS-20CP. S110v is excellent and found in the ZT high-line model.
See Ankerson's videos and posts. He's the man on steels.
 
"Super" is a word that's tagged on to just about everything, and it is almost always simple marketing or used in want of a better, more specific term. Want your clothes cleaner? Use Super Oxy-Fresh! Don't give a hoot when you hear about a boring old political action committee? I bet you'll listen to a story about a Super PAC! Normal food not good enough? Go for a super-size. Want a better knife? You'll need one with a Super Steel blade.

As stated before, the term "Super Steel" is arbitrary. If you think of the word "super" itself, it simply means 'over', 'above', (like in "superior") or simply 'very good'. Now, unless we're talking mountain climbing, no steel is 'above' any other, so in this case, you can read "super steel" as "very good steel" or "superior steel". After reading on here a while, you may see just about any steel called a super steel because in the end, when you leave marketing behind and yet you still have laymen using the term, it comes to mean a steel that they feel is very good or superior. In comparison to what, you may ask? That's arbitrary, too.

Personally , I think Super Steel is just a convenient term to refer to an ill-defined and ever-changing group of alloys that are considered at the forefront of the knife industry. Nothing more, nothing less. If you really want to know steel, go to zknives and read up on the alloys listed in the Knife Steel FAQ. Using that information, you'll be off to a good start at getting a clear picture of what various alloys are used for and what properties are important in different applications.
 
sodak said:
In my kitchen, a knife has to suffer no damage from being dropped into a sink from about a foot up. And that's a real-world test, unfortunately... I could never get away with Ankerson's S110 blade, I'd be crying by the end of the week.....
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I use that, a South Fork (Spyderco), and a CPM 154 Fillet knife. :)
 
cm_bushman said:
Personally , I think Super Steel is just a convenient term to refer to an ill-defined and ever-changing group of alloys that are considered at the forefront of the knife industry. Nothing more, nothing less.
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This. At the moment, we have no other name for the crop of wear resistant steels that have excelled at edge holding, that are being used in premium knives these days.

If not super, what other name do you guys suggest?
 
singularity35 said:
This. At the moment, we have no other name for the crop of wear resistant steels that have excelled at edge holding, that are being used in premium knives these days.

If not super, what other name do you guys suggest?
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Personally I use the terms high alloy stainless and high alloy non stainless, but that's me. :)
 
I've been looking for a better term as well, I'm starting to think a few 'genres' are better than trying to lump all of them together under a blanket like Super Steels. Otherwise, I agree with Ankerson that "High Alloy Steel" is preferable, especially because it's more favorable for precise definition.
 
cm_bushman said:
Otherwise, I agree with Ankerson that "High Alloy Steel" is preferable, especially because it's more favorable for precise definition.
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The problem is, "high alloy" is hardly a precise definition. Where do you draw that line? 440C has up to 20% alloy content ( including carbon) so most would agree that's pretty "high alloy"... but it's hardly considered a "super" steel anymore. CPM-3V has just over 12% alloy (again, including carbon) but many if not most would agree it does fit in somewhere with other modern "super" steels. Note that a difference of 8% is huge in this context, in terms of how it affects the steels' properties.

Of course, chemistguy's example of REX-121 with a whopping 40% alloy content is surely "high-alloy", no one would argue about that. But that's a fairly extreme example, and in fact it's very rarely made into knives anyway. I'm not entirely sure Crucible's even making it anymore; I was told by a reputable steel dealer that it's just too expensive, wasteful to produce, and too difficult/costly to machine to make it worthwhile. So it's really more of an anomaly than a legit cutlery steel.

Likewise, structural non-austenitic stainless steels routinely have alloy content higher than 20%, but they're basically useless for knife blades. All that chrome is "free" and strictly there for its self-passivating properties. They have so little carbon that they don't harden much if at all in the first place, and certainly not enough to form the wear-resistant and grain-refining carbides we know and love.

That's why I include manufacturing processes, particle size, and general "cleanness" or purity in what constitutes a super steel. No one's going to bother with the expense of particle metallurgy to make 303 stainless for tubing and pipes ;)
 
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Ankerson said:
I use that, a South Fork (Spyderco), and a CPM 154 Fillet knife. :)
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I recently got my brother a South Fork, for a kitchen knife and lets just say a whole bunch of his Shun knives have been seeing the drawer a lot more. I dont think people relieze just how good that knife is.
 
james terrio said:
The problem is, "high alloy" is hardly a precise definition. Where do you draw that line? 440C has up to 20% alloy content ( including carbon) so most would agree that's pretty "high alloy"... but it's hardly considered a "super" steel anymore. CPM-3V has just over 12% alloy (again, including carbon) but many if not most would agree it does fit in somewhere with other modern "super" steels. Note that a difference of 8% is huge in this context, in terms of how it affects the steels' properties.

Of course, chemistguy's example of REX-121 with a whopping 40% alloy content is surely "high-alloy", no one would argue about that. But that's a fairly extreme example, and in fact it's very rarely made into knives anyway. I'm not entirely sure Crucible's even making it anymore; I was told by a reputable steel dealer that it's just too expensive, wasteful to produce, and too difficult/costly to machine to make it worthwhile. So it's really more of an anomaly than a legit cutlery steel.
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I totally agree here. In my above post, I just meant that one could use the term "high alloy steel" in a more rigorous way, like stainless steels which need at least 12-14% chromium or a certain percentage of free chromium (I know it's not completely agreed upon), or Tool Steels which only need 4% alloy to qualify as far as I know (which would make all stainless steel tool steel as well, mind). In this sense, empirical data could be used in place of superlatives like super.

Of course, you're still right about where to draw the line. Marking a certain alloy percentage as the "super line" would inevitably include many lackluster alloys (for cutlery) and exclude many, like 3V, which are at the forefront of the industry.

It is a slippery slope, and one which all of my critical thinking skills have thus far failed to surmount, for what that's worth. I say, we, the knife community, work toward a more diverse classification system of steels that we can all agree upon rather than dubbing some super based on hype.

Any suggestions?
 
cm_bushman said:
I totally agree here. In my above post, I just meant that one could use the term "high alloy steel" in a more rigorous way, like stainless steels which need at least 12-14% chromium or a certain percentage of free chromium (I know it's not completely agreed upon), or Tool Steels which only need 4% alloy to qualify as far as I know (which would make all stainless steel tool steel as well, mind). In this sense, empirical data could be used in place of superlatives like super.

Of course, you're still right about where to draw the line. Marking a certain alloy percentage as the "super line" would inevitably include many lackluster alloys (for cutlery) and exclude many, like 3V, which are at the forefront of the industry.

It is a slippery slope, and one which all of my critical thinking skills have thus far failed to surmount, for what that's worth. I say, we, the knife community, work toward a more diverse classification system of steels that we can all agree upon rather than dubbing some super based on hype.

Any suggestions?
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Super steel also still works well. A few people may dislike the term but I bet 95% of the people here know what we mean when we say "super steel". It may not be precise, it may be annoying to some people but if we're communicating...
 
I remember that.

Be ready for the super non-steel alloys. Big funding push by the DOD to develop all aspects of technology surrounding this effort that will eventually reach the consumer and the DOE is funding research to reduce the cost of getting them to us.

Just when you thought you had the latest and greatest.
 
singularity35 said:
Super steel also still works well. A few people may dislike the term but I bet 95% of the people here know what we mean when we say "super steel". It may not be precise, it may be annoying to some people but if we're communicating...
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I suppose so, it would be swatting a fly with a hatchet then, anyway. When we get to Ultra Steel though, I'm drawing the line!
 
Hah. Wait til you try Rosta Frei. Nothing even comes close, mon. Over 4 times the impact resistance of Busse's INFI, twice the edge retention of S90V at optimal hardness. Unbelieveable performance, too bad it's been discontinued...

I think Ankerson got the last one, but they didn't have enough steel for a knife, so he got some prototype toenail clippers, IIRC. Jim, how much cardboard have those clippers been through? I'll bet it's tough measuring that on a postal scale!
 
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