Month: December 2020

Steel and Knife Properties

2020 in Review: Knife Steel Edition

Larrin

2020 had a lot going on, of course. But a lot of good came in the area of knife steel. Let’s go through some of the highlights.

New Steels

The big announcement in terms of new steels was the Spyderco-exclusive CPM SPY27. This steel was announced in January of this year, and I offered early analysis based on the released composition here: CPM SPY27 Analysis. That wasn’t the end of my SPY27 coverage, however, as I was able to get a bar from Spyderco and Niagara Specialty Metals and perform a range of experiments on it, including hardness, corrosion resistance, toughness, and microstructure evaluation. Read the results of my experiments here: SPY27 Testing. read more

Edge Retention, History - Articles - Books, Super Steels, Toughness

Vanadis 8 – Better than CPM-10V

Larrin

Thanks to Will and Justin Mann for becoming Knife Steel Nerds Patreon supporters!

My book Knife Engineering is available for Christmas and Hanukkah presents.

History of Vanadis 8

The history of Vanadis 8 goes back a lot further than just the steel itself, really we have to know the history of 10V to know all of the background that is relevant. You can read about CPM-10V in this article. CPM-10V is important because Vanadis 8 is intended as a replacement for CPM-10V, or at least for similar applications. CPM-10V was developed by Crucible in the late 70s, as the first powder metallurgy steel to utilize a microstructure made up of only vanadium carbide, as opposed to chromium and molybdenum/tungsten carbides. This gave 10V a combination of good toughness along with very high wear resistance from the ~10% vanadium and therefore ~17% vanadium carbide. read more