Artisan Cutlery AR-RPM9 Knife Steel
Composition Analysis Graph, Equivalents And Overview

AR-RPM9(Artisan Cutlery) - AR-RPM9 is a proprietary alloy by Artisan Cutlery, introduced circa mid 2020. Promoted as a PM steel for budget knives. Actual steel producer is unknown at the moment, at least to me, if you know who makes it, please share the info. If I had to guess I'd say Ahonest Changjiang is a reasonable guess, since Artisan Cutlery used 8Cr13MoV stainless steel made by Ahonest Changjiang, but who knows. From the published materials, the sentiment is, AR-RPM9 is supposed to improve over more traditional budget stainless steels from AISI 440A and AISI 440B groups. Composition remained a secret for a short while, until Artisan Cutlery posted it on their instagram page, in a short video, although still hard to find on the net. It's a stain resistant steel, which benefits from PM technology, easy to sharpen. Technically AR-RPM9 is a high carbon steel with 0.90% C in it, and 18% Cr ensures good stain resistance. Interestingly also contains trace amounts of Vanadium(V) 0.1% and Cobalt 0.3%. Silicon range is a bit strange 0.20%-0.80% and along with the Nickel specified as < 0.40% those are the only ranges mentioned in their video, the rest of the alloying elements are shown with precision to 2nd decimal place and obviously that's an average number, no way anyone can produce anything budget resembling with that accuracy. In terms of edge holding, won't compete with AISI D2 steel used in other knives from the same maker, but it is deemed an upgrade over other budget alloys used by them - 8Cr13MoV stainless steel.

Manufacturing Technology - PM

Country - United States(US)