sethwm wrote: ↑Thu Feb 09, 2023 8:54 pm
This isn’t a thread about which knife you want to see in magnacut, but if the knife of your choice was in magnacut (assume the same price as your favorite other steel) is there another steel you’d prefer? If so, which and why?
I suspect there’s a bunch of people who just want variety for variety’s sake, and that’s great. I’m with ya.
But from a practical user perspective, why something else?
Interesting thought experiment. In terms of the folding knives I use for work, yes, I can see myself replacing all my PM steels with MagnaCut (if I didn't have to re-buy them). Having above-average to excellent ratings in all 3 attributes (edge retention, toughness, corrosion-resistance) takes out a lot of the variability involved in work knife use. That said, design/ergonomics/usability is still king for me. A MagnaCut blade won't make me like a knife design that doesn't work for me, and by the same token, I won't like a great design any less just because it is not available in a MagnaCut version. MagnaCut is a genuinely revolutionary development in cutlery steel for sure—the "you can only have 2 out of 3" rule was held to be immutable by just about all knife enthusiasts before Larrin came along & changed the game. But a good knife is about more than just its material construction.
There are also use cases where I can see myself opting for something besides MagnaCut. For the larger fixed-blades I use as part of my trail-clearing toolkit, I'd probably pick Cru-Wear over MagnaCut (assuming equivalent hardnesses). I'd trade MagnaCut's Salt levels of stainlessness for Cru-Wear's extra toughness, as I do a lot of chopping & put a fair amount of lateral stresses on the knives I use for this particular purpose.
I also like the idea of having a few knives in steels that are easy to get sharp on the most basic of sharpening tools, in a fraction of the time it would take to sharpen a PM steel loaded with vanadium carbides and niobium carbides. Decent steels like VG-10, 154CM, 440C, 14C28N, BD1N, H1, LC200N, all the way down to stuff like AUS-8/8Cr13MoV, V-Toku2, and even 1095 and 420HC. Sometimes, the "sharpest" knife you have isn't the one that holds an edge the longest, but the one that you can get razor-sharp the fastest in less-than-ideal conditions.