hello allenC !
That's really a good question and I think everyone would have his own favourites and steels therefore, and so do I.
Personally I make a difference in carbon steel and stainless steel. Don't forget that we are speaking about a possible survival situation, that can also take weeks or longer to resist. In that case I would opt for a carbon steel blade! Yes, it needs a bit more maintenance, but,....... it IS very easy to resharpen, even with stones you find anywhere, it takes a decent edge and holds it very well. And it is tough. Ma favourite blade steels therefor are 1095 and 5160 and especially some handforged Finnish Leuko-puukko combinations, for example a Leuko with 8"carbon blade and a Puukko wit 3,75" stainless blade from Marttiini in the same sheat.
The other possibility is to look for a stainless steel. Regarding the necessarity of resharpening in an extreme long time situation it has no reason for me to go for ATS 34/154 CM, BG-42, CPM and so on. A solid blade, made out of 440 A or even 420 J2 may be the ultimate choice! These blades - and I can say this from my own experience - are easy to resharpen with a stone you cand find nearly everywhere!
Very interesting was, that I lately found out, that there is one of the newer so called "super steels", that offers nearly the same ease of resharpening: VG-10! This was really surprising me. But it worked great! During a survival trainig I made for some guys in the woods we were digging holes to find water and I did it with my Fallkniven A1, and after finishing the edge was damaged and dull, no wonder, there were a lot of stones in the ground! Then I took one of the stones and tryed to resharpen, and,.......IT WORKED!! Sure, I couldn't get my A1 razor sharp,.... but,........who needs it to survive?? It needs to cut good and so did it, in a way that surprised me a lot!
greetings
sniper66
