MagnaCut, MagnaCut, MagnaCut: Larrin Thomas’s steel has been the talk of the metallurgical town ever since its debut last year. But 2022 really feels like the Year of MagnaCut, with dozens of custom makers and manufacturers rolling out knives made from the stuff. Boker is the latest to jump on the bandwagon with the Sherman EDC, their first-ever MagnaCut release.
If you keep tabs on Boker’s voluminous output you might recognize the Sherman. The design debuted last year, a cutlery tribute to the Sherman tank, one of the most famous armored vehicles of the 20th century. Not only did the knife emulate the Sherman profile on a visual level, but its Chad Nichols Damascus blade was a special recipe made from real Sherman tank components.
The switch to MagnaCut here makes the new Sherman EDC, as it’s being called, the easy choice between the two when it comes to real world use. The Sherman Damascus is beautiful, historically interesting, and not without cutting capability, but the improvement brought on by the presence of Thomas’s trendy steel is marked. As the man behind the incredibly in-depth Knife Steel Nerds website, and author of a book on knife steel, Thomas was uniquely positioned to create a steel formula designed from the ground up for use in knives. “The big innovation about MagnaCut is that it is designed to have no chromium carbides after the final heat treatment,” he told us in an interview in 2021. “That allows it to have the same fine microstructure and high toughness of a non-stainless powder metallurgy steel.”
The steel isn’t the only change Boker made to the design. The Sherman EDC’s 2.95-inch drop point blade steel still has a thumb stud like its predecessor, but a flipper has been added as well. The front scale is now made from carbon fiber instead of Micarta, and the pocket clip upgraded to sculpted titanium with a ceramic ball pinch point. And if you miss the historical appeal, don’t worry: the damascus backspacer on the Sherman EDC, like the blade on the original, is made from Sherman tank materials.
Boker says that the Sherman EDC should arrive at the end of November.
Knife in Featured Image: Boker Sherman EDC
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