A2 Tool Steel is a great steel for knives but stainless it is not. Ron Lake, George Herron, and Phill Hartsfield used it extensively. Phill mastered differential heat treating to almost perfection. I have a bunch of A2 blades and use them often. Coat with chapstick and the steel is well protected.
Understand it’s not “stainless”, but much more stain resistant than my normal steels. The only stainless steels I have on hand are AEB-L (which I’m not interested in using) and a small amount of CTS-XHP which I do not have in a large enough quantity to validate attempting to build a batch of knives.
A2 just seems to be a good middle ground steel. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I have nine plates of 1/8”x7”x36” of precision ground A2.
