Benchmade M2?

For what it's worth:

The other day I was cutting up some chicken wire. I was using the wire cutters on my Leatherman Supertool, and just for the heck of it I decided to see how much trouble it would be to use a knife blade instead. I tried cutting the wire with an M2 AFCK, a serrated Endura, and a Sebenza. All three blades suffered damage. In the case of the Sebenza the damage was in the form of a semicircular chip, less than one mm, but easily visible without magnification. In the case of the M2 AFCK, the damage was due to deformation rather than breakage, and the edge could be restored fairly easily with a few strokes on the Sharpmaker. The damage to the Endura's edge seemed to fall somewhere between the other two: edge deformation with a bit of what looks like minor chipping.

All three of these blades had been sharpened to a high performance (i.e., as thin as I could conveniently get it) edge. I blame the damage in all cases more on the accuteness of the edge angle than on the steel.

The bottom line is that the M2, even with a very accute edge, was highly resistant to major damage. This toughness enables a person to sharpen the knife for high performance cutting with less fear of significant edge damage. In the future I will consider sharpening the Sebenza and the Endura to 40 degrees rather than 30 or less degrees as I had been doing.

How does the story end?

After mungering up the high performance edge on three good knives, I finished the job with the Leatherman.

David Rock

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AKTI Member # A000846
Stop when you get to bone.

Both AISI 304 stainless steel and SAE-AISI M2 steel are iron alloys. They have 75% of their average alloy composition in common. There are 22 material properties with values for both materials. Properties with values for just one material (12, in this case) are not shown.

For each property being compared, the top bar is AISI 304 stainless steel and the bottom bar is SAE-AISI M2 steel.