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Found out my $12 pocket knife from the gas station has the same steel as a $90 one
I was killing time at a hardware store in Boise last Saturday and picked up one of those little steel info cards they keep by the knife counter. The guy working there pointed at the card and said most of the cheap folders and the fancy ones both run 8Cr13MoV, just heat treated different. I went home and checked the blade stamp on the $12 knife I've carried for 2 years, sure enough, same steel. The $90 one has better scales and a smoother pivot, but for opening boxes and cutting zip ties all day, I can't tell the difference. Anyone else stop paying for blade steel once they figured out what their actual cutting looks like?
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taylorhunt7d ago
Figure the heat treat matters more than the steel name anyway, but nobody tests that part because you can't see it on a stamp. Two knives with the same steel can act totally different if one gets a cheap quick temper and the other gets a proper cycle. So the $12 one might hit a soft batch and roll its edge on a zip tie while the $90 one holds up, and you would not know until you ran both hard for a month.
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