Sleipner corrosion resistance?

I recently purchased an M5 in Santos wood. I have been very impressed with the knife, to say the least. Within the few moments I first picked up the knife, I had to name it Sophia!



I have a couple quick questions as I only have experience with “stainless” steel knives. Can I store the M5 in the sheath? Would camellia oil be a suitable protectant for the Sleipner steel? Thanks for any help!
 
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Eva 2 said:
I have a couple quick questions as I only have experience with “stainless” steel knives. Can I store the M5 in the sheath? Would camellia oil be a suitable protectant for the Sleipner steel? Thanks for any help!
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Sleipner steel is fairly corrosion resistant, but you still need to take precautions with it to keep it protected. Any oil or silicon based protected will work fine. Storing it in a leather sheath is fine, but you need to make sure that you wipe the blade off first after use and either treat the inside of the sheath with oil/silicon or wipe the blade down with oil/silicon for storage.

One option to really help a sleipner blade resist corrosion is to put a patina on it. It is beneficial to put a patina on carbon steels to make them a little more corrosion resistant, and since sleipner has a relatively low chrome content you can do the same for it. Here is an example of what I did to a Lionsteel KUR:

LionSteel KUR in Sleipner. The blade got the occasional rust from living in the sweaty south eastern USA, so I needed a better solution than just keeping it oiled all the time. I decided to see if I could get a patina out of the low chrome steel, so I disassembled the knife, and polished the blade to a mirror shine using Flitz and steel wool. I cleaned it off with rubbing alcohol, and then dipped the whole blade in a glass of hot apple cider vinegar for 30 minutes. Usually this method will turn a carbon steel blade with little to no chrome in the composition to a dark blue/tan and be more rust resistant. On the Sleipner steel it came out with a very "slight" color change to a light blue/tan and now shows a textured pattern. You can see the color change if you compare the silvered stropped edge to rest of the patinaed blade. Kinda hard to see in the picture unless you get the lighting just right. So far the patina has prevented the steel from staining after cutting up food and various woods. No rust yet, but I haven't pushed it in corrosive scenarios like a sweaty pocket just yet. Oil/CLP and steel wool will not remove the patina, so it is fairly durable.
 
I tried out your advice. The knife has a patina that looks similar to the blade in your picture. But it also has some quite dark small blotches. They are similar to a rust spot in shape but dark blue-grey. Did that happen to you?
 
Got a picture of it?

A patina will be unique to the particular piece of steel. You never know how it is going to turn out. I have noticed that patinas seem to be "nicer" if you really polish down the steel so that it is as close to a mirror/satin finish as possible, and then clean it carefully with alcohol so that there are no finger prints....etc, before it goes in the cider bath. Also, heat up the apple cider vinegar so that it is too hot to dip your finger in it, but not too hot. This will help keep bubbles from forming on the steel surface and help the process.
 
I have had some smaller spots like that before. Some fine steel wool and oil have rubbed then out usually. If that doesn't get them out, then you can add Flitz metal polish to the fine steel wool to rub off the finish and get down to the bare metal again. Then you can restart the apple cider vinegar patina process again.
 
MicroAlign said:
I have had some smaller spots like that before. Some fine steel wool and oil have rubbed then out usually. If that doesn't get them out, then you can add Flitz metal polish to the fine steel wool to rub off the finish and get down to the bare metal again. Then you can restart the apple cider vinegar patina process again.
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I’m not too worried about aesthetics. Is it okay to let them be?
 
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