Powder Steel

Powder steel was developed in the late 60s in Sweden. Reserved for decades to highly specialised industrial use, in the recent years it has become more accessible to artisan makers. Nowadays, it is widely used in tactical knife making. However, vast majority of kitchen knives are still made from traditional steels.   

What is powder steel?

Steel components such as Carbon, Tungsten, Vanadium, Chrome, Molybdenum, Cobalt are melted and refined into a fine powder. This powder is then compacted and sintered (heated under pressure) to create a solid ingot. 
Through this elaborate and highly technological process, powdered steel (unlike ordinary steel) achieves a uniform arrangement of carbides. Carbides in steel perform the same function as cobblestones on the street: they are harder than the steel surrounding them, improving the wear resistance of the blade. As a result, powder metallurgy enables the introduction of large amount of alloying elements into the steel without a decrease in its strength.
Raw powder steel is produced by a handful of manufacturers globally. The most prominent ones are Crucible Industries (USA), Hitachi (Japan), Böhler-Uddeholm (Austria). Available powder steel models range from stainless to highly reactive and can be designed for toughness (flexible at the expense of sharpness and edge retention) or hardness (more brittle but with extreme sharpness and edge retention). The choice of right steel within that range depends on the use requirements of the blade and the capabilities (know-how) of the knife maker. Some well known, top shelf powder steel models include names like HAP72, CPM S125, REX121, S390 and ZDP-189.    

Why powder steel?

Simply put, powder steel blades can achieve better consistency within its microstructure. Powder metallurgy maintains very little variability in the initial mix of elements and the steel blank we start with is always the same. On the other hand, composition of traditional steel can fluctuate somewhat widely. As a knife maker, we want total control during the forging process. That provided, we can experiment with various heat and cryogenic treatment formulae knowing that our baseline is always consistent. 

Important to remember that choosing powder steel carries some risks for a knife maker. It is more expensive (sometimes significantly), not easy to procure, requires a lot of experimentation to develop sufficient treatment skills and is often very time consuming to shape, grind and sharpen. It is a little bit like a formula 1 car: not everybody needs or wants one. Moreover, not everybody can build it.

When handled by a skilled knife maker, powdered super steels result in exceptionally hard blades with superior sharpness and edge retention. Qualities that might be paramount to you in the kitchen.

Here at OXYS we work exclusively with powder steel to make high-quality, premium knives that can be hardened and tempered to a very high level of hardness, toughness and durability.

Precision and performance before everything else.