Thread: Knife Blade HRC (Rockwell Hardness)

Originally Posted by Oldbloke

Starting to sound like,

Lots of marketing,
Compromise again.

Hardness is often misunderstood/misrepresented. Its a measure of how resistant a metal is to plastic deformation, nothing more nothing less. Basically what it really tells you in a knife sense is how thin a knife/edge can be before the edge just bends deflects and folds

It correlates to edge holding but there are a bunch of other determining factors so can only be used to compare edge holding in a given steel. For example a 58rc elmax knife will hold an edge for far longer than a 61rc 1095 knife despite being much softer. So if you have 2 knives of the same steel it can be a useful metric.

All that said, there is no performance reason to make a knife softer than about 58rc. Almost all cutlery steels will easily reach this hardness(even the very cheap ones), and its hard enough to support good thin cutting geometry. Steels softer than this are produced this soft for ease of production and finishing, they will all be relatively thick and have poor geometry to support the soft maluable edge, or if thin will be prone to rolling.