cww.blog!

Katy and I returned to Pittsburgh yesterday, and we expect to remain here for a while. I think I will be in Manhattan and/or rural Maine for a few days in March, but other than that, the next travel dates will likely be in May or June.

I'm a little closer to understanding enough about steel alloys to be able to solve the problem I found with my Wüsthof Classic knives.

Codes and Standards Training Inc. (CASTI) publishes the CASTI Metals Black Book in European and North American variants. As Wüsthof is based in Solingen, Germany, I looked at the "lite" version of the European variant (available here), and I found the key for the particular subset of steel alloys in question.

The number after the X is the percentage of carbon in the steel, multiplied by 100. So, X50 means 0.50% carbon. Each chemical symbol after that stands for a component of the steel, in decreasing order of significance. Then, numbers at the end of the designation, separated by hyphens, correspond to the percentage of those elements.

X50 Cr Mo 15, then, should mean the steel contains 0.50% carbon, 15% chromium, and less than 15% molybdenum.

I still don't know how the different compositions affect the quality of the blade or the longevity of the knife, but I'm working on that.

Also, now that I'm back home, I looked at my other Wüsthof Classic knives, and it turns out they, too, vary in composition, though only two of the steak knives' alloys are represented: X50 Cr Mo 15 and X50 Cr Mo WV15. Hmm.