Spyderco Product Reveal 22 Mixes Salt Steels With Italian Integrals

Spyderco has run twenty-two Product Reveals now, and the format has become the company's substitute for a trade show: a batch of new models announced together, with no booth and no press schedule. Reveal 22, published on October 1, is one of the more balanced instalments, splitting between the workhorse models buyers already know and a genuinely new collaboration.

The familiar half is the Salt expansion. The Para Military 2 Lightweight now gets a Salt variant with bright yellow scales and MagnaCut steel, and the Shaman gets the same treatment in the yellow-and-black bumblebee colourway Spyderco introduced a few years ago. Salt models exist because standard stainless steels will pit in saltwater even when they are technically corrosion resistant. MagnaCut is the steel that made this expansion obvious: it combines the corrosion resistance of a nitrogen steel with edge retention closer to a conventional powder steel, which is exactly the combination a fisherman or a coastal carrier needs. If you have followed knife steel at all over the last three years, this was the least surprising announcement in the reveal and the most useful.

The new half is more interesting. Thyn and Slym are Spyderco versions of the Michele Pensato-designed Skinny integral folder, built in collaboration with LionSteel, and they keep the integral construction and M390 steel across two blade sizes. An integral handle is milled from a single billet rather than assembled from two slabs, which eliminates the joint entirely and adds stiffness at the cost of a much longer machining cycle. Spyderco has not done many integral knives, and doing it with LionSteel, one of the few European makers with the tooling for it, is the right call. The Navigator 3 revives a design first released in 1997, this time as a non-locking knife in grey G-10 with a powder-metallurgy M390 blade. The Pathway is a fixed blade from professional fisherman Lance Clinton, a terrestrial companion to the Waterway, running a 4.43-inch 9Cr18MoV blade with textured FRN scales. The Byrd line also picks up the Magpie.

Verdict: the Salt PM2 and Shaman are the models most buyers should care about, because they solve a real problem for anyone near salt water. The Thyn and Slym are the ones collectors will chase. Budget-conscious buyers should look at the Pathway, which is the only genuinely new fixed blade in the batch.