What other production knife maker besides Cold Steel offers a San Mai style blade?

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Folderguy

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What other production knife maker besides Cold Steel offers a San Mai style blade?

San Mai is Cold Steel's name for their sandwiched blade.

Kershaw has their Elmax steel. Any others?

Any others with large (as in over 10") blades?
 
San Mai is a technique of welded steel that laminates the hard core of the blade with softer outer layers. Basically, this is Awase on both sides of the Hagane, but not over the spine. Cold Steel did not invent the term, they copyrighted it.

Fallkniven has some large bowies.

William Henry does laminate in smaller knives.

CAS Iberia has a number of laminated entries.

This is all off the top.

Best Regards,

STeven Garsson
 
I believe Kershaw's version of composite blades is completely different, with the harder wear resistant steel only at the very edge while the rest of the blade uses a softer more corrosion resistant steel.

The only other blade I'm familiar with that has a sandwiched blade steel is the Caly Jr. in ZDP-189/420J.

But to be honest, I don't see too much appeal in it, at least in Cold Steel's offerings. My Talwar had a sandwiched blade, but I didn't really think it was practical since the outer layer was soft and easily scratched, which didn't work too well along with the mirror polished surface.

I think it works pretty good for ZDP-189 and its corrosion resistance issue, though I would find DLC coating to be just as great:thumbup:.

I find Kershaw's version to be more effective as a cost saving measure, the cool factor, as well as additional toughness along the spine.
 
Elmax is not a 'sandwiched' blade like cold steel's San Mai. It's just a particular kind of steel, made by Uddenholm (sp?). There is no sandwiching involved.

IIRC, though, they did a couple of blades with SG-2 sandwiched between softer steel slabs (in the Ti JYDII and the SG-2 Blur, iirc).

Spyderco offers the Caly 3 with ZDP-189 steel sandwiched between 420.

Fallkniven offers all kinds of knives with either VG10 or SGPS cores (or was it 3G cores?). They are the only other ones I know of that offer pretty gargantuan knives with that style of blade.

I think the Kabar Bk-11 was also available in a san-mai blade with some kind of hitachi-made steel core at some point, but I'm not sure if it still is or not.

And then there's custom knife makers...
 
Dorito Monk said:
I think the Kabar Bk-11 was also available in a san-mai blade with some kind of hitachi-made steel core at some point, but I'm not sure if it still is or not.
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yeah thats what I was going to say...It's still out there, It's in stock at most places online.
 
MTguy said:
yeah thats what I was going to say...It's still out there, It's in stock at most places online.
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Found it:

"The first Becker knife released under the KA-BAR product line, the BK11CSM is an updated version of the Becker Necker. Made to the same dimensions as the original, the CSM Necker features a Carbon/Stainless Metal blade. It has a carbon steel core of Hitachi White Steel 2 sandwiched between two layers of 410 stainless steel.
Each knife comes with a plastic injection molded sheath."


However, it's not a large blade, just 3 1/4" long
 
San Mai means three layers, so the term can apply to pretty much any laminated blade.

Commonly, laminated knife blades consist of a core of steel hardened to a high HRC, sandwiched between outer layers of softer, more flexible steel to provide addition strength to the blade.

Most Fallkniven blades are laminated (or San Mai), but they do offer a few blades in solid VG10.

Kershaw has done San Mai

SOG

Also, many modern chef's knives feature San Mai Steel. Al Mar and Hiro by Shiki are two that own with San Mai.

Kevin
 
do you need a stainless blade? there are a good number of japanese san-mai makers out there, mostly carbon steels and pretty expensive. I've got a chinese made san mai kanetsune knock-off that's honestly very good IMO but then I don't like very hard steels in my large fixed blades.
 
SOG makes several the Tomcat 3.0 being one of them but the weird this is they don't advertise it.
 
Folderguy said:
Found it:
However, it's not a large blade, just 3 1/4" long
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Yeah you're right, I forgot you were looking for 10" + blades...I don't think I've seen many san mai blades over like 5"

EricV said:
Moras come in laminated steel.
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Yeah thats true, my stainless Mora is defiantly laminated, you can tell by looking at the spine since they never seem to finish the spine on their knives.
 
The only other San Mai knife I can think of is the special Becker Necker. I think it's called a Blem but I'm not positive.
 
Fallkniven has laminated steels,and so is Rockstead, ZDP189 sandwiched by ATS34, or ZDP189
 
Mcusta with "Damascus " steel is vg 10 core with some crap on both sides , same thing .
 
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