Bohler M390 Stainless.

The shelf right now is one knife

There is exactly one M390 listing live on the site: the Boker Plus Baba Yaga Linerlock at $152.11, marked down from $161.06. One knife, one model, one brand. That is the whole shelf.

M390 is one of the most respected premium stainless names in the market, so people land on a page like this expecting a rack of folders to sort through, and dressing a single listing up as a category would waste your time. What this page can do instead is tell you what the alloy actually is, what it asks of you once you own it, and why anybody searching for M390 should also read the CPM-20CV page before deciding.

M390 and CPM-20CV are the same idea from two mills

The most useful fact on this page is that M390 and CPM-20CV sit in essentially the same compositional family, made by two different companies. M390 comes from Bohler-Uddeholm in Austria. CPM-20CV comes from Crucible, a different mill. They are not the same product and the mills are not the same business, but the compositions sit in the same family.

What that means when you shop: you are mostly not choosing between two performance classes, you are choosing between two knives. Blade geometry, how thin the maker grinds it, the lock, the handle, and the heat treatment each shop runs will move the result far more than the letters stamped on the blade. So if the one M390 knife here is not the shape or the size you want, go read the CPM-20CV page and judge that shelf on its own merits.

What the powder route is buying

The type line above calls this a powder metallurgy stainless, and that is not marketing shorthand. In conventional steelmaking, molten alloy is poured into a large ingot that cools slowly, which gives the carbides, the hard particles that do the cutting work at the edge, time to grow coarse and to cluster unevenly through the billet.

The powder route sprays the molten alloy into fine droplets that freeze almost instantly, then consolidates that powder back into a solid under heat and pressure. The carbides end up small and spread evenly. That matters most in an alloy carrying a heavy load of carbide forming elements, which is what the composition chips above describe. A fine, even carbide structure is what lets a steel run this hard and still take a clean edge instead of crumbling along coarse grain.

What an M390 edge asks of you

The return on a steel in this class is that you sharpen less often. The bill comes due when you finally do. A high carbide powder stainless resists abrasion by design, and a basic aluminum oxide bench stone can end up burnishing the edge rather than cutting the carbides back. Diamond or CBN abrasives, light pressure and patience are the honest answer.

Two habits help. Thin the whole bevel back occasionally instead of only touching up the apex, because a steel that holds this long will otherwise get slowly fatter behind the edge over years of touch ups. And if you send knives out to be sharpened, say what the steel is before you hand it over.

On corrosion, this family is about as forgiving as stainless gets, which is what you want in a knife carried against a leg all day. Forgiving is not immune. Wipe it dry, keep the pivot clean, and rinse it after salt water.

The one knife on the shelf, in specifics

The Baba Yaga is a small folder. The blade is 2.75 inches with a satin finish and the knife closes to 3.88 inches, so this is a pocket knife for everyday cutting rather than something you would carry to a woodpile. It runs a linerlock, a green micarta handle, an extended tang, a pocket clip and a lanyard hole, and it ships boxed in a black nylon zippered storage case.

The alloy is Bohler-Uddeholm's, out of Austria. The knife itself is made in China, which the listing states plainly and which is worth knowing before you buy rather than after. There is a real logic to putting a steel with this much edge life on a short blade. The small knife that lives in a pocket is the one you cut with most often, and it is the one whose edge you notice going dull.

Where it sits in the rest of the Lab

M390 sits in the flagship tier of this catalog, in the same company as CPM MagnaCut and CPM-20CV. If you are shopping the top of the range rather than one specific knife, those are the pages to read next. MagnaCut has its own entry with its own shelf, and every steel we carry is listed on the Steel Lab hub. This page will not tell you how M390 and MagnaCut compare, because that comparison belongs somewhere both sets of verified figures are on screen at once.