White Steel #3 - High Carbon Steel

Compared to other readily available steels in knives such as Yellow Steel and SK4 Steel, White Steel #3 (Shirogami #3) has seen a decrease in general usage in products. We'll get into why later in this blog.

Additionally, many knives using White Steel #3 actually don’t have it in their names! Over the last ten to twenty years, the naming structure for these kinds of knives have tended to focus on their sharpening style such as “improved sharpening” instead of listing the material itself that is used.

Of course, this is just a marketing move and it’s important to note that not all companies do this, and naming conventions may not necessarily imply the inclusion or exclusion of White Steel #3 in a knife.

The fame of White Steel #3 lies in how well it works with honyaki treatments, especially oil treatments. If done by a properly trained craftsman, this will lead to a beautiful blade pattern or hamon.

With our own knives, our focus is always on sharpness. As a result, we normally use White Steel #2 with a water quenching (Mizuyaki Honyaki). However, due to the difficulties in honyaki and just how easily blades can crack in the creation process, some manufacturers prefer to go with a White Steel #3 base, and especially focus on oil quenched blades over water to focus on that knife’s pattern as well as keeping costs down. As a note, there is nothing wrong with this - simply a different approach to Japanese knives!

If you are looking for a beautiful hamon on your knife, White Steel #3 is a great material to explore!

Steel material is crucial for indicating a knife's initial performance (amongst many other things related to craftsman ability and more). Below are some comparisons to give you some understanding showing what a particular step of the process does in terms of impacting sharpness, balance and maintainability.

There’s three key pointers in the above chart to focus on.

• Steel Material has a large impact on sharpness and maintainability (ease of sharpening and resistance to rust).

• Apart from sharpness, heat treatment and the sharpening process in knife creation also have a large impact on sharpness.

• Measuring a knife’s strengths is more than just its sharpness. Balance and maintainability also need to be considered.

Based on the above steel mapping chart, White Steel #3 falls in this position on the graph below

While White Steel #3 falls on the lower price range compared to other carbon steel materials used in knives made in Japan, it is also liked because of that affordability. On top of this, it still maintains the ease of sharpening that White Steel is known for. For people who give priority to ease of sharpening, and want to practice on a slightly cheaper knife White Steel #3 may be for you!

Easy to sharpen, yet still affordable!

Let’s look at the tables below and explore the composition of White Steel #3 more deeply. Pay special attention to the carbon and Hardness Rockwell Counter ratings.

When compared against White Steel #2, White Steel #3 does have a lower carbon content. However, the presence of brittleness-causing materials like phosphorus and sulfur is comparable to White Steel #2 and Blue Steel #2, suggesting that White Steel #3 is still a great steel to work with for knifemaking. In effect, it is still a relatively pure steel material.