Calculator › Steels › W2
W2 is the hamon steel: shallow hardening, so a clay-backed blade hardens at the edge and stays soft at the spine with a dramatic, controllable line between them. It has vanadium for grain refinement and gets very hard at the edge. Quenched without clay it behaves like a fine-grained 1095.
| Good for | Hamon blades — tantos, kitchen knives, hunters, seaxes — and anything where a differentially hardened spine is wanted. |
|---|---|
| Forging | 1800–1900 °F; do not forge below 1500 °F |
| Normalize | 1650 / 1500 / 1350 °F (NJSB) or a single 1600 °F (Cashen) |
| Austenitize | 1450–1475 °F, 5–15 min |
| Quench | Brine or fast oil (Parks 50); water or brine for anything over 1/8 in; interrupted quench for hamon work |
| Temper | 400 °F twice → 60–61 HRC at the edge (as-quenched 65–67) |
| Working hardness | 60–63 (edge) HRC |
Typical shop values. Confirm against your supplier's datasheet.
Flat bar 1/16–3/8 in, 1–16 in wide, from New Jersey Steel Baron; the other knife suppliers don't currently carry it. No round bar.
Suppliers: New Jersey Steel Baron Alpha Knife Supply Jantz
Stock removal: the bar is cut to blade + tang + clean-up, so the tang section and forged thickness below only change the finished-weight estimate. Switch to Forged and they change the stock length too.
Tang dimensions are estimated from the tang style until you change them. Measuring yours is worth doing — a forged blank's length depends on the tang's cross-section, not on what the tang is called.
Stock removal: fill factors only change the finished-weight estimate here. They set the stock length when the method is Forged. Grinding loss has no effect at all in stock removal — the bar is cut straight to the profile, nothing is drawn out.
The fraction of the blade's and tang's bounding box that is actually steel once the bevels are ground. Distal taper is factored in separately now (see "Distal taper" below, under What this assumed) and isn't editable here yet — these two fill factors are the ones worth replacing with your own measurements: weigh a finished blade, then adjust until the finished weight below matches the scale.
Steel is only part of the cost. Add abrasives, handle, heat treat and your time, and see the price that actually pays you.
Copy link to this calculationW2, then 1095 and 1075. All are shallow hardening; W2 has the finest grain and the most active hamon.
Bar sizes for ten common knife patterns, weight per inch for every standard flat bar, and quick heat-treat numbers for the usual carbon steels. Print it, tape it to the grinder.