Spyderco's Sage 6 in Rex 121 Survived 14 Days in Italy Unsharpened
The most useful knife review published this week does not test a new knife at all. A reviewer at NemoKnivesReview carried a single Spyderco Sage 6 in Rex 121 through fourteen days in Tuscany, used it as his only knife, and never sharpened it — which is a far more relevant test of a super-steel than any paper-cutting video.
The choice of steel is what makes the experiment interesting. Rex 121 is a high-vanadium cobalt high-speed steel with wear resistance at the extreme end of what production knives use, and it has a reputation problem: the internet is full of reports of broken Rex 121 blades, usually accompanied by the claim that the owner was "just cutting cardboard." The reviewer's explicit question was whether Rex 121 is too fragile for ordinary countryside EDC — and whether a knife costing roughly twice as much as other super-steel folders justifies the premium.
His conclusion, as reported by Knife Magazine's newsfeed, is that Rex 121 behaves like the Jack Reacher of tool steels: it keeps going. He also makes the fair disclosure that he owns only one Rex 121 blade and doesn't use it enough to have chipped it. A second reviewer quoted in the same piece adds the counterpoint that matters for buyers: Rex 121 is a pain to sharpen. That is the trade — the harder and more wear-resistant the alloy, the longer you go between sharpenings and the more work each sharpening becomes.
That tension explains why high-vanadium steels stay niche. Most people would trade some edge retention for a blade they can restore on a pocket stone in five minutes, which is exactly why AEB-L, 14C28N, Nitro-V and MagnaCut dominate the practical end of the market. Rex 121 is for the user whose sharpening setup is a proper guided system and whose reward is not touching it for weeks.
Verdict: if you have been scared off CPM Rex 121 by broken-blade posts, this is a real-world counterexample worth reading. If you don't own a sharpening system you enjoy using, spend the money elsewhere — the steel that survives two weeks without a stone is also the steel that punishes you when it finally dulls.
Read the full review at NemoKnivesReview. Spyderco products carry no affiliate link in this article.