Blue Steel #2 - High Carbon Steel

Blue Steel (also called Aogami) is a material created by adding chromium and tungsten to White Steel, which enhances its resistance to wear and tear damage. Among the Blue Steels available, Blue Steel #2 is most well known for its durability to chipping while maintaining sharpness.

A forged Yasuki Steel (a knife steel brand by Hitachi Metals) blade can have a razor-sharp edge that cuts crisply, is easy to sharpen on a whetstone, and quickly regains its sharpness. However, each cut it makes against a cutting board, frozen product or bone causes it to dull very quickly.

This led to the creation of Blue Steel, with the intention of adding two main concepts to the material: 'flexibility = toughness' and 'resistance to abrasion = wear resistance'. Specifically, small amounts of chromium and tungsten are added.

As a result of these material additions, Blue Steel #2 not only has a sharp edge but an improved cutting ability on the blade - creating finer cuts.

While White Steel is known for its ease of sharpening, quickly bringing a knife to a high level of sharpness, it's also just as susceptible to losing it. On the other hand, Blue Steel, with its flexibility, can retain its high sharpness for a longer time. It's well known for its wear resistance and excellent cutting performance even when the edge is worn out, plus possesses the ability to cut through ingredients with a silky motion.

The delicate sensation behind the way Blue Steel cuts is what we call amagire (sweet cut). The sense of describing this cut as "creating a taste of its own" is a unique aspect of Japanese culture that we feel is worth truly cherishing.

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, Blue Steel #2 falls in this position on the graph below

Stays strong and durable, with a cut that feels smooth!

Let’s compare Blue Steel #2 to other well known steel products via the table below. As it is a Blue Steel variant, be sure to pay attention to the Secondary Materials tab.

When compared to the White Steel #2 made by Hitachi Metals, we see a clear addition of tungsten and chromium to Blue Steel.

These two elements contribute to the excellent edge retention, flexibility, and toughness Blue Steel is known for. Considering that Blue Steel #1 and Blue Steel Super have a higher carbon content and require considerable patience in sharpening anyway, Blue Steel #2 can be regarded as a very well-balanced steel material.