In this article, you will learn about the best steels for knives and how to choose the one that suits your needs whether you are a knife collector, practicing bushcraft, survival, camping, or any other activity that requires you to use a knife for completing tasks.
Why does the type of steel matter?
The steel is the most important part of a knife and buying a knife with excellent quality steel is extremely important. There are a lot of different types of steel used for knives available on the market today and a lot of catchy terms are used to describe it, but also to enhance the appearance and make the knife look like its better quality than it actually is,
What is the main difference between them?
The main difference is whether the steel is carbon or stainless. Those two are technical terms used to describe what elements are used in steels alloy and for differentiating the steel’s ability to resist rusting process,
Carbon steels are called that because they have some of the carbon added to the alloy making the steel able to be hardened. Higher carbon content in the steel alloy (usually higher than 0.3-0,4% is considered the border between low carbon steels that are unable to be hardened via quenching and steels with a higher carbon content that can be hardened with that process. )
Stainless steels refer to alloy that has at least 12% chromium in it. It makes the steel resistant to rusting, but it is important to note that although it is resistant it could still rust so if you have a knife with this type of steel don’t just leave it wet sitting around.
How to choose the right one?
While these two groups are most different there are probably dozens of different steels available today and it makes choosing the right one a big problem. As you could probably guess the answer to this question is not a straight one, because you have to consider lots of different factors like
-What is your budget?
-What will you use a knife for?
-How good are you at sharpening…
Also, steel is just a raw material, how it is heat treated is probably just as if not more important than the steel itself. The manufacturer of steel that the company is using is also important because if they aren’t consistent with the batches the quality could vary a bit.
What is your budget?
This one is probably the main concern when trying to buy a knife, It is often questioned whether you can get a good quality knife for cheap, The thing whit all of the tools and gear you usually get what you pay for is the only real difference will be few occasional knives that are reasonably priced and offer a great value for the given money. They are usually some traditional knives that have been around for a long time or a newcomer that wants to beat the market,
What will you use a knife for?
Now, this is mainly focused on wheater you will use a knife for heavy-duty tasks or lighter tasks suited for pocketknife-type use. Usually, the knifes used for heavier tasks tend to be a bit softer to improve steel toughness because the harder steels tend to break rather than bend with heavier use like chopping down small trees or batoning (splitting) firewood. As a tradeoff, these steels tend to become dull faster,
Knives are used for lighter tasks like peeling fruit, preparing food, carving, etc are more often than not harder and have greater edge retention (stay sharp for longer). Also, you will see a lot more steel variants and all kinds of different handles on these knives because people tend to take greater care of them than they do with batoning knives.
How good are you at sharpening?
In the knife-lover community is a known fact that certain steels are easier to sharpen than others and some require a lot more practice so that you will be able to sharpen them properly. Basic high-carbon steels tend to sharpen a lot easier than the stainless variants and especially against so-called super-steels that have other types of elements added to them like Molybdenum, and Vanadium which greatly improve edge retention.
What are some of the best steels?
While it is hard to point out just a few of them, I put the steels in different categories by what you can on average expect from them.
Those categories will be Corrosion resistance, Toughness, and Edge retention.
Note that these steels will be in order from the best (first) and progressively worse but every steel on this list is exceptional in that category. If steel is not mentioned here it probably is worse than the ones that are ranked here.
Corrosion (Rust) Resistance
This category will cover the steels that are considered to have good corrosion resistance which is obviously important because you don’t want your knife to rust. It is important to note that most quality steels will have pretty good resistance to rust but if you are for example fisherman or someone who is around a lot of salty water then you will need some of the following steels.
Lc200n
Vanax
Magnacut
M390
20cv
204p
S110v
14c28n
440a
Bdin
1.4116
420hc
Elmax
M398
N690
S45vn
Toughness
Toughness is a measurement of how good the steel is at resisting cracks and fractures that ultimately break the knife. This category is somewhat the opposite of edge retention because usually, the tougher the steel is the worse it is at staying sharp, of course, there are some that are somewhere in between but usually people tend to choose one over the other.
Because the toughness depends on so many factors like the steel used, hardness of it, size and a number of carbides, heat treatment, imperfections in it and so on I will just list the ones that on average are better than others.
z-tuff
8670
5160
420hc
3v
Lc200n
14c28n
52100
19c27
Edge Retention
As mentioned before edge retention is the measurement of how good the steel is at staying sharp. This tends to be the most talked about and arguably most important category here, especially for pocketknives.
-rex 121
-z max
15v
S125v
10v
S90v
S110v
K390
Zdp-189
Vanadis-8
S60v
204p
S30v
Sources:
In writing this article I have used many different sources but the one that has helped me the most is a website called KnifeSteelNerds.com so if you want to learn more about this topic that is a great pleace to learn.
Conclusion:
As you can see choosing the right steel can be a genuinely difficult process and when you take into consideration the variations between companies in the heat treatment process and suppliers of steel you get anything but a predictable outcome. So this guide should have helped you to understand the differences between steels and their compositions, what makes steel good at certain things, and how to guess knifes’ performance based on the steel used.
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