Loki :
I've used it to cut/chop softer woods like palm and pine. It seems to work just fine for that work.
A five dollar machete will chop on soft woods like pine all day long. A high end blade should not be so limited in scope of work. You can easily buy a knife for far cheaper than the Fallkniven laminate that will easily chop all kinds of hardwoods.
I don't use knives to chop on hardwoods - that's what an axe is for ...
Quality wood cutting axes (Gransfors Bruks) are not overly thick at the edge nor ground at obtuse angles. The profiles are in fact far thinner than common tactical knives, and can run with the best of the current production blades. They are usually fifteen degrees or so at the very edge with a very large relief grind.
I would bet the edges on the Bruks axes are easily in the same class and possible thinner than the Fallkniven bowie laminate. If the Fallkniven is much more acute at the edge, under 10 degrees per side, then it would not be fair to expect them to be able to cut hardwoods or bone as Peter commented. If this is the case, this kind of geometry should probably be noted on the website .
Jeff :
I still don't see much point in having a knife that bends this easily.
It is common for the Japanese to use very mild metals for the sides of laminates. This was primarily done because it was cheap. Why make the whole blade out of quality steel since only the edge does the cutting. The easy to machine side laminates also speed up sharpening as the Japanese typically use very wide bevels and have you contacting a huge area when honing. The very soft bodies also make them very shock absorbant which can be a benefit for reducing vibrations in use. I am not totally sold on the latter you would want to compare a similar knife with a full hardening to be sure.
The weakness of the blade isn't a factor in Japanese knives as they would not get called on to be subjected to lateral stress, you simply would not pry with them. If you do, most of them can be broken trivially. Compare a Japanse saw with a western one, the western ones are almost impossible to break, but you can without effort buckle a Japanese saw in a "w" shape. Same with laminate puukkos compared to the full carbon steel ones. So I can see a laminate having a place as a high performance cutting tool but with significant restrictions as general use.
The higher impact strength of the blades isn't generally a functional advantage if they are really soft, similar with differential tempers/hardenings that have near annealed spines. While the knives will take direct pounding well, they are very easy to buckle so they don't last long in that kind of rough use. This way of thinking is also kind of outdated in the sense that there are now steels that are not brittle even when full hard, CPM-3V for example at 58 RC, L6, S7 , etc. , they are also very cheap and easy to obtain, especially when you consider the cost of the alternatives.
I passed around the idea of a very high performance laminate with Phil Wilson awhile ago, CPM-10V or 15V core and CPM-3V or 1V sides. The problem is that you still have to have the edge be able to take the shock of hard use so you can't go really extreme with the core. Maybe a core of CPM-3V at ~58 RC and sides of S7 at ~55 RC. You need to have care in matching the steels or otherwise heat treating is going to be difficult. Would this blade however have any practical advantage over made of CPM-1V - probably not. Would be fun to work with though.
-Cliff
