While the knife may not look all that fancy, it sure performs superbly. One of the highest performance cutters I have ever tested. Hitachi Aogami Super steel is one of the best for kitchen knives and many other knives, and Takeda is a well known and respected knife maker. Combine those two and you get a very high performance knife. One of the very few knives that came with less than 10deg per side edge.

Friday, January 21, 2011 19:14:54

There was a minor error in composition posted earlier. Mn content was incorrect, fixed as per the new Kershaw catalog.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011 13:16:59

Fellow knifenut from Hungary, Tibor came through this time :) New Kershaw catalog had more detailed composition than just Carbon and Nitrogen we knew about before. Details in the alloy link.

Monday, January 17, 2011 17:27:59

Well, I got lucky again. Friend bought the new Takeda special size gyuto, in other words, it's just 52-54mm wide, vs. much wider normal ones. 280mm long blade, kuro uchi finish, and that thing is a laser in terms of cutting ability. Really thin blade past midsection. Edge measures 10 per side at most. I have my usual mega salad cutting test planned for the evening. That's about 15lbs greens to chop, mince and shred. We'll see how it fares, but I'm already excited to play with it. Expectations are very high.

Sunday, January 16, 2011 13:18:52

Menu link sizing was incorrect for the whole site in FireFox, any version. Fixed.

Saturday, January 15, 2011 23:52:41

I got it for my friend a while back. Well made small fixed blade, and I think a good choice for surfers and other folks hanging out around the salt water. Myodo H1 steel used in this knife is impervious to rust, not just tain resistant. Didn't use it to much, but it was enough to get a good idea about its performance and ergonomics. Sharpened it twice. Second was a minor touch-up, to restore shaving sharp edge after testing. Overall, I'm quite positive about it, details in the review.

Thursday, January 13, 2011 20:37:17

I was revising the steel compsition chart yesterday, when I've noticed rather big difference in Chromium content between AISI D2 steel and KAD181, 11-13% for D2, and 18% for KAD181, while I had them both listed in the same group. Anyway, I did more research, and found KAD181 listed as half a dozen other steels, D2, Sleipner, Rigor, A2, SLD8, etc... Weird, to say the least. Luckily I had compositions of all the other alloys in the chart as well, and it was very different from anything they list. As such, KAD181 was moved into its own reference group. To make things even better, I managed to dig up science paper from two Japanese authors, which provided more accurate chemical composition of the KAD181 steel, all earlier sources, including interactive knife steel chart listed just C, Cr, Mo and V. In addition to that the paper contained Si and Mn content, plus more precise values for the earlier data. In short, very good find :)

Tuesday, January 11, 2011 20:42:42

Added steel steel makers website links to the knife steel resources page. I go through those periodically, hunting for the new alloys, or newly published compositions of old secret alloys ;) Anyway, if you happen to find anything in there that I missed, please let me know.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011 11:32:54

Friday, December 31, 2010 16:15:49

Fellow BF forumite, Knarfeng provided data, thanks a bunch for one more piece of info. Detalied info - 1095 Cro-Van steel composition.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010 19:51:12