Most knife listings give you a steel name and a paragraph about “expert heat treatment” and stop there. We put the actual Rockwell C number on every one of ours — 60–61 HRC, 58–60 HRC, whatever it measured — because that number is the single biggest lever on how a blade actually performs before geometry or steel choice even enters the conversation, and leaving it off is like describing a car by its badge instead of its horsepower.
It also keeps us honest internally. If a batch of 52100 blades starts chipping more than we’d expect at the hardness we specified, the Rockwell tester is the first thing we check before we start blaming the grind — and more often than we’d like to admit, that’s exactly where the answer turns out to be: a furnace running a few degrees hotter than the dial says, quietly under-hardening an entire batch.
