Are High End Blade Steels Truly That Important?

Hey everybody! So I recently posted a video about why I'm bored of Spyderco's designs. As I was reading the comments, a lot of people mentioned how great Spyderco is with all their high end blade steels. It kind of got me thinking about how I value steel when I'm picking up new knives. Even though Spyderco is known for continually pumping out all those fancy super steels, that thought never once crossed my mind when I was thinking about them as a company. It also got me thinking about how necessary all these super steels are. Does the new Maxamet steel truly get considerably better performance than VG-10? You want to say yes, since you're paying so much more for it. Also, I think a lot of people just go along with what everyone else says. When I first got into knives, I knew that 440 was worse than 8Cr13MoV which was worse than VG-10 because that's what I always heard on videos. This isn't always the case though. You really need to experience these things for yourself before you blindly go around following what people say. Honestly though, I don't think higher end blade steels are that important. I've tried my fair share over the course of the years, and I never really could tell a noticeable difference.  Before I jump into my points, just keep in mind these are all just my opinions. What's awesome about this hobby is that we all value different factors when it comes to knives. Some of us do a lot of cutting where we need these high end steels, while others value looks or ergonomics. I will say, I don't do many hardcore cutting tasks with my knives. Most of my cutting is either paper, cardboard, fabric, rope, etc. I don't use my knives all that often either, so I can typically go a good while before they lose their edge. If you're using your knives for longer a longer duration in a single sitting, then I could see how the performance would be more noticeable to you than to someone that could last for a short duration over hundreds of sittings. If you don't have minimal usage like me, than maybe nicer blade steels are more important to you. I never once have felt like I didn't have a sharp enough knife or one that lost its edge too quickly.

So one of the biggest reasons I don't understand the point in dropping tons of money on knives with better blade steels is because there's this awesome invention called a sharpener. For me, the cost of buying a sharpener is much more affordable than having to drop at least $80 plus to get a higher end blade steel. That's even a low estimate when it comes to knives with better blade steels. Most Spyderco's with fancy blade steels, like S110V, S30V, Maxamet, etc., are at least $100. I'd rather spend $50 on quality sharpening equipment to continually maintain my knives. You really shouldn't be letting your knives get super dull anyways. If you're always keeping up with your blades, they'd never get to a noticeable point where you might wish you had a "better" blade steel. Now don't get me wrong, I do think there's some terrible no-name steels out there. But when you're deciding between VG-10, 8Cr13MoV, Elmax, S30V, and the list goes on and on, you can't possibly say the performance is that far off from each one. Sure I may be spending more time to maintain my blades, but I find sharpening quite enjoyable, so it's worth that monetary and time cost. I don't personally see a huge drop-off on steel quality when I'm using a $30 knife or a $150 one. I've never gotten into that aspect of this hobby. I've always gotten great performance based on my own standards. That doesn't mean there isn't a difference, but for a more casual, as-long-as-it-works type user, I cannot tell a difference at all. If you get extremely good at sharpening, most of the time you can turn a crappy edge into something completely amazing that's on par with those high end steels.

The fact you pay more for something does NOT solely mean you're going to get better results or performance. This applies to more just than knives. There's a lot of factors that go into making a knife, and a higher cost can't necessarily mean better steel all the time. A different analogy for this is high end cameras. I could go out and buy an $8000 professional DSLR camera, but that doesn't mean I'll take any better photos than someone with an iPhone. With photography, your composition, editing, and vision can make up for lesser quality equipment. I never look a photo and be like, "I sure wish this was a 36 megapixel photo." No. Instead, I look at the overall photo and don't consider top-notch quality. That's pretty much the same way I view blade steels. I look at the knife as a whole, not just one tiny, specific aspect of it. You could hand me a knife with ZDP-189, and I'd simply say okay and do my cutting. Blade steels are just a bunch of letters and numbers to me. I don't have every blade steel to compare side by side at any given time, so I can only go off of what I know and have experienced before. With that being said, even if I've used a high end steel in the past, there's no way I'm going to be able to remember that this XYZ knife cut X times better than this knife I'm currently using. New blade steels pop up all the time, and it's hard to keep track of what's better than what.

What do high end steels offer that a regular, budget steel can't offer anyways? When I think of blade steel, there's only so many aspects to it. You've got your overall sharpness, which I would say is probably the most important part of the steel. Having a dull knife is counterproductive. If I'm reaching for a knife, I obviously knew I needed something better than my hands. You've also got edge retention, which is pretty important as well. You don't want your knife to be useless after one cut. Besides that, I can't think of too many other necessary aspects of steel. I guess there's how resistant to rust it is. You don't want a steel that's very corrosive, because that could really screw up your knife cosmetically and functionally. I'm not sure how steels that are more conducive to chipping fit in. Maybe overall quality of the steel. As you can see now, I'm just grasping for straws to try to figure out what a good steel needs to offer. For me, I value sharpness and retention. Even with crappy steels, I've never had any issues with rusting or chipping, so that's a non-factor for me.

How would you even quantitatively determine how good a steel is? The makeup of the steel alone means nothing if you've got a bad heat treat or edge on there. Cutting is a pretty subjective thing too, so it's hard to compare steels across the entire market. It'd be really interesting to have blind tests where you perform a number of tasks with a variety of steels. The issue is these tests would never completely be standardized. All companies do things differently. I don't think people realize how much more goes into a blade's performance besides the makeup of the steel. There's the heat treat and sharpening plus on the user end, there's your own cutting technique, usage, etc.

Do you think knife companies will ever hit the wall with how supreme a super steel can be? I do think there will be a point when blade steels can't possibly get any better. So the question now then is would you rather companies focus resources on improving blade steels or coming up with new designs, locks, etc? Blade steels are not the most immediate or distinguishing factor about a knife, so why keep putting time, money, and effort into improving something that is already perfectly fine. Maybe in a couple of years, we'll be so shocked with how crappy the steels were back in good old 2017. I don't think that will be the case though. Blade steel has come a long way in the past few years, but I don't think it can continue on this pace forever. At some point, the marginal improvement in quality and performance won't make the extra cost worth it. Sorry for the length of this post. I at least hope I made you all think a little more. I'm no expert by any means, and admittedly I know next to nothing about how blade steel works. I probably haven't even tried a wide enough scope of them compared to some people out there. Anyways, hope you enjoyed reading all this. It was a ton of fun to write. Thanks for looking!