CTS-BD1

A relatively-new steel from Carpenter Steels, designed to be nearly identical to GIN-1/G-2.

CTS-BD1 consists of:

Carbon

Chromium

Cobalt

Copper

Manganese

Molybdenium

Nickel

Nitrogen

Phosphorus

Silicon

Sulfur

Tungsten

Vanadium

0.90

15.50

/

/

0.60

0.30

/

/

/

0.37

/

/

0.10

Information from the Spyderco catalog on the web

High-performance American-made blade steels are propelling the quality and performance of today's knives to new and higher levels. A U.S.A company called Carpenter Steel recently entered the knife making arena, cutlery people noticed. Carpenter isn't a newcomer to alloy manufacturing just a new-neighbor in the community of blade steel manufacturing and they're launching a new family of alloys called CTS™ steels specifically for cutlery. One of those is CTS-BD1. CTS-BD1 is patterned on Gingami I (also known as G2), the gold-standard for Japanese cutlerers. Its superior edge retention and surface finish are machined to a fine edge and it heat-treats consistently.

History, mentionings from the forums etc.

• Sal Glesser posted on BladeForums.com in 2010:

"Another steel that was specially formulated to our request is Carpenter steel's new CTS-BD1. This is, in my opinion, an optimal formualtion for a blade steel. It is based on Hitachi's well known "Gingami I" (silver paper), also knows as G2 (early Spyderco's) and GIN 1 (current Spyderco's). CTS-BD1 has been "tweaked" by Carpenter's metallurgist, Rick Gleixner and the result is very nice, and USA made."

• In this post on the Spyderco.com forum, from 5 January 2023, Sal Glesser shares some information on the development history of CTS-BD1:

We worked with Carpenter for several years to help the develop their blade steels. Testing CATRA and corrosion and going back and forth with suggestions and more testing. When we finally had all of their blade steels down, Their head Metallurgist came to me and asked what they could do for us to thank us for our helping them.

I asked them to make a steel that we were importing from Japan called Gingami 1. There was no American equivalent. 440B is similar, but the perfornance of Gingami 1 was far superior to 440B. I asked them to reproduce the chemistry and then "tweak" it for greater performance. After much testing, CTS-BD1 was the new steel, and performance was even better than I had expected.

I had hoped to "own" the alloy, but that was not to be. The steel was too good to just limit to Spyderco. In conference with Carpenter, I had mentioned our using "G2" as the steel marked on blades in earlier models, as we couldn't use Gingami 1 at the time. I told them that G2 stood for "Good **** Also". We later converted the G2 to GIN 1 when we were larger and had more clout.

Carpenter showed their good humor when they came up with "CTS" which stood for "Carpenter Good ****", bit if pressed, they say it stands for Carpenter Tool Steels.

CTS-BD1 is proving to be an exceptional alloy punching far above it's weight and shouldn't be written off as 440B.