Jeroen Knippenberg

Apex Ultra is one of the most carefully engineered non-stainless kitchen knife steels in modern circulation, and the project of an Austrian smith — Tobias Hangler — who set out, with Marco Guldimann, to design a steel for the kitchen rather than borrow one from another industry. It carries roughly 1.25 percent carbon, around four percent chromium, modest tungsten and molybdenum, and a small vanadium addition. The composition is tuned to produce a fine, evenly distributed carbide structure that supports hardness up to 67 HRC while delivering toughness comparable to 52100 at the same hardness — a combination that is the entire point of the steel.

What this means for a cook is unusual permission. You can ask a maker to grind an Apex Ultra knife thin enough that a White #1 owner would call you brave, then ask for the heat treatment to land at 65 HRC, and the resulting edge will hold for longer than Aogami Super without microchipping. It sharpens cleanly on natural and synthetic stones alike and patinas slowly because of the chromium content, though it is not stainless and should be treated as a carbon steel.

Apex Ultra has become a signature steel of the European maker community, and the Modern Cooking catalogue carries an unusually deep bench of smiths working in it. Tobias Hangler himself heads that group, alongside Marco Guldimann, Benjamin Kamon, Martin Huber, Jonas Johnsson, Karol Karyś, Birch & Bevel, and MCx. It is genuinely a step forward — one of the relatively few cases where the marketing claims and the underlying metallurgical data are saying the same thing.

RWL34 — usually shortened to RWL — is Damasteel's powder-route stainless equivalent of ATS-34 / CPM-154, and is the bright-and-hard layer in much of the world's high-end stainless damascus. The composition (1.05 percent carbon, 14 percent chromium, 4 percent molybdenum, 0.2 percent vanadium) is essentially ATS-34 chemistry, but the rapid-solidification powder process produces a finer, cleaner microstructure than the conventional ingot route.

In a kitchen knife — usually a Damasteel-pattern blade — RWL34 runs at 60–62 HRC, sharpens cleanly, and produces a refined edge that holds well for the class. Edge retention is in the same band as SG2 at slightly lower hardness; toughness is good; corrosion resistance is excellent. The named association with Robert W. Loveless, the steel's original collaborator on the design, is half of the steel's mystique.

You see RWL most often as a mono-steel core in high-end custom work and as the contrast layer in Damasteel patterns. Among the makers Modern Cooking carries, Bernhard Noitz, Erik Gullikson, Evan Antzenberger, Jeroen Knippenberg, and Birch & Bevel work in RWL. It is a genuinely nice premium stainless that is somewhat under-discussed compared to the American powder steels.