Cliff Stamp
BANNED
- Joined
- Oct 5, 1998
- Messages
- 17,562
There are frequent comments about abuse mentioned in relation to batoning, even in regards to chopping (not as frequent) and often assertions made about superiority based on work which quite frankly is not impressive at all. Along those lines, I have noticed that natives in many documentaries often use large fantasy knives which have to have very low performance but they seem perfectly fine with them. Maybe they are given them as gifts, maybe they actually think they are status symbols vs the very plain local forged items. But in any case they never complain about them.
I recently used such a knife. It is some kind of large fantasy "sword". The blade is 0.135" thick, with a very shallow hollow grind which tapers to an edge 0.035" thick and is ground at 25+ degrees per side. It came basically ground but not sharpened. No ability to do fine cutting at all. Would just push grasses around for example. I resharpened it with a bastard file, accidently lowered it to 20 degrees. I did not mean to, the steel is just so soft it ground away almost immediately and 25 degrees is unnatural for me when hand honing so I very quickly reduced the angle during the shaping.
After the edge reset which only took a few minutes, the sword would readily slice newsprint. It was then refined with a series of Spyderco benchstones (medium, fine, ultra fine) and brought up to the ability to almost do a clean push. Quite frankly I never should have went past the medium hone without getting a clean push, but I was mainly curious as to how it would respond to the finer grits. The main limiting factor was that the edge had some small irregularities left from the filing, a 600 DMT should have been used before the Spyderco medium.
I then proceded to :
1) chop several sections of 2 year seasoned spruce, 250 chops
2) baton split one of the knotty pieces which was so hard it fractured apart
3) chopped and carved several stakes from another small section of spruce cut to length
After this work the edge was not visually effected and it readily cut grasses and easily sliced some natural cordage with no draw. Just make a loop over the edge, give a pull and the cord is neatly cut. The blade still sliced newsprint easily.
The main point of this is not that this stainless-fantasy sword is some kind of awesome survival tool. It is that in general the standards for acceptable and definitely superior performance really need to be raised.
1) If this knife can do the above with no effect on the edge what should a custom in a tool steel be able to do?
2) Can you still really call batoning abusive if it can be done on this knife with no harm?
3) If the edge on this blade can cut through knotty seasoned woods with a 0.035"/20 degree edge then what is a sensible profile for a high end custom in tool steel?
For those curious, the raw chopping performance was about 75% of that of a decent small hatchet with a lot more effort. Interestingly enough, I would prefer this over the hatchet for most limbing due to the reach and extra cut length, similar for general work on light vegetation. However for thick woods and carving, the Bruks Wildlife would be much more efficient.
Of course most of the problems with the sword are just the edge profile. It would take about 10 minutes to turn the absurd hollow grind into a nice tapered flat and then regrind the edge itself into an optomized profile. This would improve the chopping ability by about 50% and increase the cutting performance by several times to one. It would then actually out cut, out chop and stay doing so longer than most of the NIB "tactical" knives.
-Cliff
I recently used such a knife. It is some kind of large fantasy "sword". The blade is 0.135" thick, with a very shallow hollow grind which tapers to an edge 0.035" thick and is ground at 25+ degrees per side. It came basically ground but not sharpened. No ability to do fine cutting at all. Would just push grasses around for example. I resharpened it with a bastard file, accidently lowered it to 20 degrees. I did not mean to, the steel is just so soft it ground away almost immediately and 25 degrees is unnatural for me when hand honing so I very quickly reduced the angle during the shaping.
After the edge reset which only took a few minutes, the sword would readily slice newsprint. It was then refined with a series of Spyderco benchstones (medium, fine, ultra fine) and brought up to the ability to almost do a clean push. Quite frankly I never should have went past the medium hone without getting a clean push, but I was mainly curious as to how it would respond to the finer grits. The main limiting factor was that the edge had some small irregularities left from the filing, a 600 DMT should have been used before the Spyderco medium.
I then proceded to :
1) chop several sections of 2 year seasoned spruce, 250 chops
2) baton split one of the knotty pieces which was so hard it fractured apart
3) chopped and carved several stakes from another small section of spruce cut to length
After this work the edge was not visually effected and it readily cut grasses and easily sliced some natural cordage with no draw. Just make a loop over the edge, give a pull and the cord is neatly cut. The blade still sliced newsprint easily.
The main point of this is not that this stainless-fantasy sword is some kind of awesome survival tool. It is that in general the standards for acceptable and definitely superior performance really need to be raised.
1) If this knife can do the above with no effect on the edge what should a custom in a tool steel be able to do?
2) Can you still really call batoning abusive if it can be done on this knife with no harm?
3) If the edge on this blade can cut through knotty seasoned woods with a 0.035"/20 degree edge then what is a sensible profile for a high end custom in tool steel?
For those curious, the raw chopping performance was about 75% of that of a decent small hatchet with a lot more effort. Interestingly enough, I would prefer this over the hatchet for most limbing due to the reach and extra cut length, similar for general work on light vegetation. However for thick woods and carving, the Bruks Wildlife would be much more efficient.
Of course most of the problems with the sword are just the edge profile. It would take about 10 minutes to turn the absurd hollow grind into a nice tapered flat and then regrind the edge itself into an optomized profile. This would improve the chopping ability by about 50% and increase the cutting performance by several times to one. It would then actually out cut, out chop and stay doing so longer than most of the NIB "tactical" knives.
-Cliff
Chris
