Cold Steel has a way of starting a line of knives with good metal and then going to inferior grades. This time they started out with the BEST 52100 Ball Bearing Steel... 5K series steel 2% Cr 1% C and the hardness they list is close to a good drill bit's hardness. 52100 is usually only used by custom knife makers in shorter edged weapons. and CS has followed this style. In theory, you shouldn't be able to get a much better blade than this as far as metals go. It is a heavy chunk of steel with no handle inserts etc, just a chunk of heavy steel.. It comes with a brown leather sheath that is maybe too tight of a fit and hard to get out and mainly hard to get in.. I paid 69$ on Walmart and now they have upped it another 10$, but if you want the best steel possible, then buy this. Do a web search for "knife steels" and you will get many pages of info and most agree about 52100 steel.
This is just one piece of heavy steel with no handle material or inserts. The blade fits into the sheath with not much of the handle showing..... so if you are thinking about making handle inserts or leather wrapping the handle, you'll have to get another sheath cause this won't fit into the existing sheath if the handle is made thicker. Overall I consider this a collector's piece that they will change and the original will be more valuable... like an old Recon Tanto or SRK in Carbon V from 20 yrs ago.
