Show HN: I built a knife steel comparison tool

As a knife-maker, may I request 80CRV, 1084, and 1075? They're very commonly-used steel grades in knives.

Also, 440 has a number of grades.

Cool tool!

EDIT: It might also be interesting to point out the manganese levels, and whether the steel is a deep- or shallow-hardening steel. Those factors help indicate whether the steel will form a hamon or not.

globular-toast · 3 months ago

Also maybe the steel that Wusthof uses, whatever it is. They don't seem to tell you what is, though.

Zak · 3 months ago

Wüsthof prints the steel it uses on the blades of many of its knives: X50CrMoV15[0], which is also called 1.4116 and 5Cr15MoV.

It's not in OP's tool, but this article[1] by metallurgist Larrin Thomas includes it. His ratings are 2.5 for toughness, 2.5 for wear resistance, and 8 for corrosion resistance. It is a bad steel for any kind of knife and especially bad at Wüsthof's prices.

[0] https://zknives.com/knives/steels/steelgraph.php?nm=X50CrMoV...

[1] https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/10/19/knife-steels-rated-by...

williadc · 3 months ago

It's very likely 8cr13mov, which is listed

p-s-v · 3 months ago

yes, I will add this info.

thanks for the feedback

Tangent: I had a decent benchmade griptilian folding knife for the last 10 or so years. Wasn’t the sharpest knife but I loved the form factor, grip, etc.

I left it on the bed cover of my truck the other day while unboxing some towing equipment in a parking lot and took off accidentally.

Looked at Amazon to replace it and they’re going for $200+ now. Is this just Amazon tax? Tarrifs? Something else? No way in hell I paid that for it initially. It was probably $50! It’s listed at $160 on their website right now.

Why?!?! It’s a simple plastic body and a small piece of steel. Make this make sense.

Zak · 3 months ago

> Wasn’t the sharpest knife

Sharpness is a product of sharpening, which should be done regularly for good results.

Benchmade's pricing is based on irrational customers being willing to pay premium prices for knives that really aren't competitive anymore.

If you want a replacement knife that's very similar for a more reasonable price, consider the crossbar lock version of the Vosteed Raccoon.

globular-toast · 3 months ago

> Sharpness is a product of sharpening, which should be done regularly for good results.

How often? I have a Japanese santoku knife made of VG10 and I really like it when I get it razor sharp. But is it normal that it loses that after a few weeks? Do I really need to keep sharpening on a whetstone that often? I cut vegetables almost every single day.

arh68 · 3 months ago

I feel like the prices have gone up for years & years. I thought my Spyderco was a cheaper alternative to Benchmade, but now they're basically all $100+. $65 is now $130 or so.

My guess is collectors that'll buy at almost any price. Some knives from the '80s that used to cost $25 are simply eye-watering today (well past 10x).

shawn_w · 3 months ago

Benchmade has raised their prices over the years to the point where it's hard to justify most of their knives unless you're a big fan with disposable income.

jerrac · 3 months ago

Look up the Ritter Houge, or something like that. I think it's a less (maybe) expensive version of the griptilian from the same designer. I think. Could be wrong.

shawn_w · 3 months ago

Houge's the brand. RSK-Mk1 is the model (Ritter Survival Knife). Sold exclusively at https://knifeworks.com/dr/

Benchmade used to make a variant of their Griptilian that he designed (the "Ritter Grip", and when they discontinued it, Hogue stepped up (proceeds go to support Ritter's https://kniferights.org/ organization)

zikduruqe · 3 months ago

Television, survival, bushcraft, social media.

It used to be knowledge based survival skills, but today it is all gear based survival skills. Prices have gone crazy.

kurthr · 3 months ago

It seems like the steel data comes from larger database on hardness/toughness/corrosion? Can you say where that data is coming from or if it's your own measurements? If you could show the data (eg HRC) that supports the radar chart it would be easier for a purchaser to know if their steel actually meets the purported performance after purchase.

I guess what confuses me most is that heat treatment/hardening seem crucial to understanding how a knife is going to perform, but that seems left out. It's even possible to have a great treatment on a blank and screw it up (overheat) when doing the initial edge shaping. Furthermore, the sharpening angle of a blade edge seems to greatly affect edge retention especially for softer steels. It would be great to know what angles different (properly hardened) steels could reasonably support. That's something the user can control after purchase.

LarsAlereon · 3 months ago

Looking at some of the comparisons, the data appears to be (I could be wrong) scraped from this article by Dr Larrin Thomas based on his personal research and testing, possibly also including some of the other articles on his website: https://knifesteelnerds.com/2021/10/19/knife-steels-rated-by...

There are some mismatches, such as OP rating M2's edge retention at 6 while Thomas rates it at 4.

LooseMarmoset · 3 months ago

eichin · 3 months ago

Hmm, it feels like there'd be some interesting crossover between this and https://seattleultrasonics.com/pages/knife-database but while the "Quantified Knife Project" has a lot of numeric test-result data, it looks like they only have "marketing names" for the steel used (if you click through the links in the "model name" column for each knife.)

(Ah, the raw data is available https://github.com/seattleultrasonics/Quantified-Knife-Proje... has a "Blades" tab which might be enough to correlate.)

thanks for sharing, i will check these out... previously was unaware of these

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · 3 months ago

Where is the data from? How can I trust it? All of it looks LLM generated? Some of the plots and data from the comparisons seem to be missing or jumbled?

zahlman · 3 months ago

> All of it looks LLM generated?

Yeah, it's padded out to an absurd degree in the formulaic way that it does.

Too · 3 months ago

It's obviously a SEO farm filled with pure AI slop. Can't believe it made it to the front page here.

"In this comprehensive guide, we compare metal A vs metal B" with 100s of similar articles for every unique permutation of metals. Yeah right someone did that comparision... "Best pocket knife", "Best filet knife", Best Chef knife", bla blabla

abcd_f · 3 months ago

Any plans to add Japanese steels?

https://knivescombined.com/pages/steels

SideburnsOfDoom · 3 months ago

Yep. I see VG10, which some Japanese knives use. But I wanted to compare it to SG2, which is not listed. Nor AUS10.

And also the non-stainless Carbon steels.

yes I plan to add these

whalesalad · 3 months ago

metalman · 3 months ago

more interesting if it included which steels play nice when bieng forge welded together, to which I can suggest plain carbon steel in the form of a used horse shoe, and 5160 in the form of a vdub coil spring. Used air ride springs yield large bilets of 5160, that I use for tongs and die blanks, stiff stuff coil springs from trains are another large diameter stock, and torsion bars are also sometimes large, round, AND , pre tapered if someone is dreaming of a claymore to wave around. the problem with a lot of the more exotic steels is that they are "hot short" meaning that they will litteraly just crumble and fall apart if forged at too high a heat, and at too low a heat, they are impossible to forge, so heat controll must be good, and there is no time to waste either as each heat does some hurt to the metal, so aprenticing with cheap but good spring steel is the way to go.On the flip side there are some steels that are "cold short" and cant be touched durring a dull or black heat. working with strikers is good fun, and you can move a lot of metal with 4 people, one with a 4 pound hand hammer, and three with 12 pound sledges, draw out blanks in a jiffy

reconnecting · 3 months ago

Impressive work. I've always wondered how it's possible to "decompile" steel types. For example, one of my everyday use knives is a Kabelmesser pocket knife (WW2). It's probably from Solingen, although there's no logo on it.

I really like it because of the high-carbon steel, but I have no idea what specific type of steel was used, as I don't see much of such steel these days.

Onavo · 3 months ago

It's not hard, just expensive. You need to pay a lab to do it, and the testing is very much destructive most of the time.

dehrmann · 3 months ago

XRF might be able to non-destructively tell you the alloy.