Damasteel stainless Damascus chef knife blade by Monolith Knives.

What Is Damasteel? A Knifemaker's Guide to Swedish Stainless Damascus

Damasteel is a stainless Damascus-patterned blade steel made in Söderfors, Sweden. It is produced by powder metallurgy, which is steel that begins as a fine powder and is consolidated under heat and pressure, and then forge-welded so that two stainless alloys layer together. An acid etch reveals one of the alloys and leaves the other un-etched; this contrast shows the pattern in the blade. Unlike most patterned steels, both alloys in a Damasteel blade are hardenable, which means the entire cutting edge is hardened steel rather than part hardened steel and part decorative filler.

We have built knives at Monolith since 2012, and Damasteel has been our standard patterned steel for most of that time. What follows is what we have learned through working with it.

How is Damasteel made?

Damasteel begins as powder rather than as molten steel.

Most blade steel is melted, poured, and cast. Powder metallurgy starts instead with a fine steel powder, which is consolidated under heat and pressure into a solid bar. The result is an unusually uniform structure with a very fine grain. Grain size is not an abstraction when you are sharpening: the finer the grain, the finer the edge the steel will take, and the longer that edge holds.

Only after the base alloys exist does the traditional pattern welding happen. In an open forge, bars of two different metal alloys are heated to a high temperature and pressed together so the surfaces fuse into one solid piece. It is the oldest welding method, and the basis for pattern-welded steel like Damasteel. How they are folded, twisted and manipulated determines the pattern.

The two alloys in Damasteel are RWL34 and PMC27, both martensitic stainless steels, each carrying at least 13 percent chromium. Straight from the mill a bar looks like ordinary steel; you can just make out the pattern if you know to look. The pattern only appears when the steel meets an acid etch, because one of the two alloys carries less chromium and oxidizes more readily than the other. One layer goes dark. The other stays bright.

Is Damasteel made sustainably?

By the standards of steelmaking, unusually so. And Damasteel treats it as part of a tradition rather than a selling point.

Söderfors is a small village about two hours north of Stockholm, where steel has been made for more than three hundred years; anchor manufacture began there in 1676. Damasteel is a young company by that measure: founded in 1995, family-owned, with a team of fourteen. When we asked what they most wanted people to know, it wasn’t the pattern. It was this:

“Environmental responsibility isn’t a marketing line for us; it’s a standing question in every decision we make.”
    - Damasteel

In practice, that shows up in specific choices:

  • Electric kilns. The Söderfors facility runs on electric kilns.
  • Electric vehicles wherever the local infrastructure allows.
  • River water. Even the toilets are flushed with water from the river instead of the municipal supply.
  • Recycled steel, made next door. The powder steel Damasteel forges comes from Erasteel, a mill a few hundred meters away. It is made from over 91 percent recycled material and is 100 percent recyclable. Between the two forges, the raw material travels a few hundred meters.

As the Damasteel team put it, “the steel itself carries that same commitment before it ever reaches our doors.”

We tell people that a well-kept knife lasts generations. It’s good to know the steel was made with the same horizon in mind.

What makes Damasteel different from other Damascus steel?

Every alloy in the blade hardens.

That sounds like a small distinction, but it is very important to us when it comes to performance. Many stainless Damascus steels are built from one hardenable steel and one that is not – often a nickel alloy that stays bright after etching and gives the pattern its contrast. A blade might be eighty percent hardenable steel and twenty percent something that is there to look good. And that soft twenty percent reaches the edge.

Here is how we learned to see it.

A few years ago one of us made a ring out of a round bar of another maker's stainless Damascus and wore it for three years. By the end, the pattern on the inside of the ring was gone – not faded, gone. Skin had worn away the raised portions of the pattern, because the raised portions are the alloy that etches away and does not harden. That same ring was replaced with one made from Damasteel and worn for about a year. There is no visible change in it at all.

The same thing shows up on knives. A stainless Damascus blade came back to the shop with the pattern worn off in sections; the owner had been cleaning it with a scouring pad. A scouring pad should not be able to do that to hardened steel, and on Damasteel it does not.

This is also why a Damasteel blade re-etches cleanly after a repair. Because the alloys behave alike, a re-dipped blade comes out uniform instead of patchy.

None of this is something a customer would notice unprompted. It is the kind of thing you see after years of working with the material.

What are the honest trade-offs?

Damasteel costs more and is difficult to finish.

Cost. Damasteel is expensive as raw material, and the honest version is this: the same alloy that makes up part of Damasteel – RWL34 – is sold on its own, unpatterned, for a fraction of the price. For roughly six to eight times less, you can get the same cutting performance without the pattern. What you are paying for is the world class work that Damasteel does to transform already great steel into unique and beautiful pattern welded steel. You’re paying for their craft and a look you won't find anywhere else, without compromise.

If a maker asked us whether to use it: you'll love it, you won't like paying for it.

Finishing labor. A full size Damasteel blade takes between two and three hours of additional hand sanding and polishing to properly prepare the steel for etching. Some blades sit half-finished for days because this process is tiring. How far a maker is willing to take that finish is visible in the result, and we have found that putting in the effort at this stage is rewarded with a pattern that is clear and defined in the finished knife. It is slow, unglamorous work, but it is an important part of the process to allow the craft that Damasteel has put into the steel to shine through. 

What is it like to cook with?

The first thing people notice is not the steel. It’s the pattern, then the polish.

Because Damasteel has to be highly polished for the pattern to read, the finished blade has a very smooth surface – smoother than almost any Western production knife, which typically shows its grind. The polished surface meaningfully reduces drag through food. It is a side effect of the aesthetics rather than a property of the alloy, but the cook still gets it.

The second is the edge geometry. The steel is durable enough to take a thin edge and hold it, so we grind these knives thinner than a thick production knife can safely go. A thin edge cuts better, and it is easier to sharpen, because there is less material to remove before you are back at a working edge.

The third is maintenance, which surprises people. Many hard stainless steels are miserable to resharpen. Damasteel is not. It holds an edge for a long time, and when it finally needs one it takes it readily. 

Chefs tend to respond visually first and then to the cutting – in that order.

How do you care for a Damasteel knife?

Three things kill kitchen knives, and none of them is the steel.

  1. The dishwasher. Wash by hand, dry it, put it away.
  2. Mechanical sharpening. Pull-through sharpeners and grinding wheels remove far more material than the edge needs. Use a stone.
  3. Using it as something it is not. It is not a screwdriver, an ice pick or a tool for frozen food.

A well-kept knife lasts generations – people cook with their great-grandparents' hardware-store knives. How long a knife lasts has far more to do with its owner than its materials.

Damasteel asks for nothing special beyond that. It is stainless steel with a handle, beautiful in its simplicity.

Is Damasteel “real” Damascus steel?

No – and neither is anything else sold as Damascus today.

The original was wootz, made in and around the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, and the technique for it was lost for centuries. Historically, pattern welding was largely a way of conserving scarce hardenable steel by combining it with commoner metal. In Japan the same instinct produced laminated blades with a hard core jacketed in softer iron.

The modern name comes from a much shorter history. When the American custom knifemaking movement took shape, a maker named William F. Moran revived pattern welding and showed his blades publicly at the 1973 Knifemakers' Guild Show, calling the result “modern Damascus steel.” The name stuck to the whole category – the way every copier became a Xerox.

So today's patterning is not structural. It is an homage to a time when layering steel was a necessity, carried out with materials that no longer require it.

Which Monolith knives use Damasteel?

See all of our knives that are ready to ship.

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