If you're going to buy a knife, so with Solingen steel. It's the world's best steel. It's expensive, but worth every cent.
When I hunt big game in the Rockies, Solingen is all I carry. However, Havalon has become more common among Rocky Mountain big game hunters:
Replaceable blade skinning knives and hunting knives by Havalon Knives
A serious student of blade steel, you most certainly are not. Solingen is a town in Germany, not a specific steel. The Solingen brand is established and protected by German law that mandates certain properties must be present in any blade manufactured in that town, but they are generalized properties that would, and do, apply across a fairly wide spectrum of specific steel compositions. A Solingen-made knife may be made out of 440C stainless steel, or S30V stainless steel and still qualify for the Solingen brand-name designation. Or it might be high carbon steel like D2, 5160, 1095CR or O1. If you know anything at all about steel, you'll know that 440C and S30V are vastly different in chemical composition, and both are vastly different than the high-carbon steels mentioned, and also vastly different in the types of uses each one respectively would be best-suited to. Saying you only carry "Solingen steel" is the same as saying you have no earthly idea what kind of steel your knife is made of, or to what Rockwell Hardness rating it is heat-treated, or even what heat-treat rating it has the
potential to achieve.
I've been collecting (and using) knives for all of my adult life (40+ years), and I'd never heard of Havalon before. A quick skim of your link reveals that the highest-grade steel they use is AUS-8, which ain't a "bad" steel, but isn't anything above average either.
Link Removed listed
"micro-honed Japanese stainless steel blade" as the only "type" of steel they're using on that model, but which can mean anything from pure junk-steel to the best that Japan has to offer, VG-10, which is the modern designation for the steels used in forging Samurai blades in Seki, Japan for a thousand years before being designated with the modern moniker. It's highly unlikely that the Havalon blade listed with that designation is indeed VG-10, as there is no reason for a manufacturer to hide the fact that that's the steel they're using. They would be much more likely to shout it from the cyber-mountaintops that that's what they're using, such is the great reputation VG-10 enjoys amongst steel aficionados world-wide. It may not be "pure" junk-steel, but it ain't VG-10 either. It's probably something close to 440C, which, again, ain't "bad" stainless steel, but it's nothing to write home about either. I personally avoid all 400 series stainless steels because, though it does have potential to be decent, it is so widely-used because of its low cost that there's almost never a way to know which forge did the heat-treating, or how well (or poorly) they did it.
Be interesting [/sarcasm] to know how you know just how common Havalon knives are among Rocky Mountain big game hunters. Havalon doesn't even offer a fixed-blade knife of any description, and having either hunted myself over the years, or personally known a boat-load of hunters, fixed-blades have been the preferred design by far. All that blade-swapping stuff, and the very limited choices of steel available, sounds kind of gimmicky to me. But what do I know? It's been close to 40 years since I hunted in the Rockies. Maybe you do know what's common up there, but it's for sure that you know very little about steel, and I hope if the OP is still reading (which I kind of doubt), he will consider the source on that "Solingen steel" recommendation.
Blues
