Name: Knife Engineering 2nd Edition – Expanded and Updated by Dr Larrin Thomas
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Knife Engineering 2nd Edition – Expanded and Updated by Dr Larrin Thomas

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Knife Engineering 2nd Edition by Dr Larrin Thomas – Expanded and Updated

In recent years, Larrin has been mostly known as the “MagnaCut man,” but before MagnaCut, his biggest success was probably with Knife Engineering. When he started his website, Knife Steel Nerds, he hadn’t thought about writing a book because he thought he was doing a website instead. But he soon realized that a website works better for individual articles than it does for introducing an entire subject. So that led him to writing the book Knife Engineering: Steel, Heat Treating, and Geometry. That allowed people to learn the subject in order with all of the appropriate introductory material. The book has been a big success with many copies sold and many rave reviews from knifemakers and knife buyers alike. He tried very hard to make the subject as easy to understand as possible, and so it has been gratifying to hear people say that the book was exactly that.

How to make the highest performing knives. A book for knife enthusiasts, knifemakers, and blade-smiths. Not a how-to on knifemaking or blade-smithing but an in-depth exploration of the effects of different steels, metallurgy, heat treatments, and edge geometries on knife performance. This book provides ratings for toughness, edge retention, and corrosion resistance for all of the popular knife steels. Micrographs of over 50 steels. Specific recommended heat treatments for each steel. And answers to questions like: 1) Does a thinner or thicker edge last longer? 2) What heat treatment leads to the best performance? 3) Are there performance benefits to forging blades? 4) Should I use stainless or carbon steel? All of these questions and more are answered by a metallurgist who grew up around the knife industry.
The second edition has been updated with a new chapter on heat treating in a forge, expanded with new experiments throughout, and the “Heat treatment recommendation” section has been updated with forging, normalizing, and annealing recommendations.

Released October 2025

ISBN

IN SOUTH AFRICA – EXCLUSIVELY AT SD KNIVES AND SUPPLIES (25 copies coming)

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SKU: LT_KE-2 Category: Resources

Knife Steel Nerds

Description

The Second Edition

So why a second edition? There are a lot of reasons:

1. Since the first edition, I have tried to do as many experiments as possible in areas that I only had prior scientific journal articles to reference for those subjects. These included studies I performed on thermal cycling of both carbon and stainless steels, comparing different types of quench oils, and the performance of Damascus steels. There is an extra chapter in the second edition from one of these studies, all about forge heat treating. I always learn new things by conducting experiments for myself, and of course, I can test knife steels that are currently popular among knifemakers and knife companies. This significantly improved those sections of the book as the data was more directly applicable, and I could compare different types of heat treatments to give better recommendations.

2. One thing that surprised me a bit was that many knifemakers bought Knife Engineering just to see the heat treatment recommendations in the book. So I improved that section by including recommended forging, normalizing, and annealing temperatures for each. Before, those temperatures were only found for select steels in other parts of the book. I also updated each recommendation with whatever new testing I had done since the first edition. The new recommendations section also has its own table of contents with all of the steels listed.

3. New formats and wider availability – since the first edition was published I now have the option of printing the book in hardcover. I have seen some very tattered looking paperbacks of Knife Engineering! I also am publishing a PDF digital copy to Payhip. So the book will be available in paperback, hardcover, and PDF. The PDF edition also means that the book is available anywhere in the world. Before if you were in a country where print on demand was not available the book could be costly to import.

4. There are also many miscellaneous figures and experiments sprinkled throughout the book that make it significantly better when it comes to supporting information. It would be a bit tedious to list them all, but several of them haven’t even appeared on my website. In the first edition I restricted my own heat treating experiments primarily to a later chapter called “Practical Aspects of Heat Treating.” I moved most of those into the relevant chapters including many new experiments – annealing, austenitizing, tempering, etc. That way the new stuff is incorporated into the book and also the reader can learn about it within the chapter rather than a disconnected place later in the book. Overall the text is about 15% longer in terms of word count.

5. An index – the most requested missing thing from the first edition was an index. This was surprisingly painful to make. I had to double-check each page number, and it took forever. I think this is like smoking a pack of cigarettes, where each one removes 28 minutes off the end of your life. That definitely happened when I double-checked the index.

6. Improved formatting – I learned a lot about formatting books while working on my other book, The Story of Knife Steel: Innovators Behind Modern Damascus and Super Steels. There is a lot of extra white space in the first edition, and I wanted to make it look more professional. There are a bunch of charts and figures that look washed out, and so I redid them all to give them more contrast.

7. References – the first edition has the references I used at the end, but I did not include reference numbers within the text. This was a decision I made to improve the flow of the book and so as to not scare away general readers. But I regretted it almost immediately. Readers wouldn’t know which references are backing up which points, so figuring out which to read would be very difficult. I also knew that adding them back in would be way more work than including them in the first place. The references are small “superscript” numbers and I don’t think they have affected the flow of the book at all.