Any THIN knives in 3V??

[goodeyesniper]

What's funny is how as materials technology for knives gets better, designs are somehow devolving.

Think of early body armor. Heavy ass steel plates. Kevlar comes around and let's you massively drop the size and weight of the armor. All good.

Now take knives. Early knives, some thick, some thin, most with not great steel. Now we get this crazy steel with good edge stability and strength, and moderate wear resistance for today. You would think everyone knows thinner means higher performance in most situations. Yet instead of taking these awesome steels and optimizing performance, like we do with everything else, we decide they MUST be thicker and lower performing.

 

[Hard Knocks]

BRKT 3V Ultralite bushcrafter is thin at 0.090 inches.

This was the first one I thought of in 3V as well. Very thin, and only 2.7 ozs. in weight.

 

[Rasco]

The Bark River Bravo Necker is 3.3mm thick and comes in 3V. They are currently sold out but a new batch is suppose to be coming this year. That's the closest knife I can think of but that's without handle scales on it.

KnivesShipFree has a ton of Bravo Necker IIs right now.

Here's a few pics for comparison:

 

[Grease]

3v actually seems to have great attributes for a thin knife. Now, in today's thickness obsessed, YouTube destruction test generation of knife users it is marketed mostly towards stupidly thick knives, but that doesn't mean it somehow sucks in thin knives. Just because people have forgotten, or merely never learned, just how much hard work a nice thin blade can handle, doesn't mean thin is delegated to "light duty slicing"only.

I saw a Gavko video a while back where he took a ludicrously thin blade he had made and was chopping through thick wire without damaging the edge... An edge which, by the way, he had flat ground down to zero. Kinda like the edge on a Mora, only thinner & taller stock with a full flat grind... His theory, which seems to hold up to testing, is that a thinner edge wears less since it wedges through stuff easier. So a super ridiculously thin blade can actually chop through stuff without damage, the way you'd expect a thick knife to perform.

What's funny is how as materials technology for knives gets better, designs are somehow devolving.

Think of early body armor. Heavy ass steel plates. Kevlar comes around and let's you massively drop the size and weight of the armor. All good.

Now take knives. Early knives, some thick, some thin, most with not great steel. Now we get this crazy steel with good edge stability and strength, and moderate wear resistance for today. You would think everyone knows thinner means higher performance in most situations. Yet instead of taking these awesome steels and optimizing performance, like we do with everything else, we decide they MUST be thicker and lower performing.

^ +1.

I've been into Busse knives lately, and while I love their designs, the only blades of theirs that I've kept have been the thin ones. They make all these crazy sharpened slabs of metal, yet the Swamp Rat tomahawk famous for cutting a car in half, frame and all, is only 1/8th inch thick. I can't imagine any scenario where knife steel would have more demanded of it than that, so why do we ever need thicker blades than that?

 

[dePaul]

And many would argue that those attributes are much more important than pure wear-resistance. It depends on what you plan to cut.

Exactly. As I mentioned previously, A thin slicers primary goal is to go through material without effort and yet keep its sharpness. 3V will blunt more quickly than a reasonably good SS steel cutting abrasive and fibrous materials. A good SS steel will be able to take a thin edge as well. The difference between 3V and a good SS in that matter is not that huge.

So, as you say. It all depends on the intended usage. However a thin slicer is most often not used for heavy batoning, bending/prying or other kinds of lateral stress where the higher level of edge stability is needed.

~Paul~

 

[Ban]

Made this one from .050 thick 3v. Thin has always been in for me personally.

 

[Gator97]

You could do a custom. I have one, Phil Wilson CPM 3V utility knife, 1.15mm thick, 62HRC. Cuts like there is no tomorrow

 

[Brisket]

Knife maker Big Chris here on the forum works with 3V, 4V and 10V among other premium steels and grinds a nice thin edge. I don't have any 3V from him but I have a 10V knife from him that is nothing short of amazing and he is a great guy with deal with. I have some of the smaller Barkies (Bravo Necker - .130, North Star EDC - .125) in 3V with thin edges and have experienced good edge performance from them.

 

[Shotgun]

What's funny is how as materials technology for knives gets better, designs are somehow devolving.

Think of early body armor. Heavy ass steel plates. Kevlar comes around and let's you massively drop the size and weight of the armor. All good.

Now take knives. Early knives, some thick, some thin, most with not great steel. Now we get this crazy steel with good edge stability and strength, and moderate wear resistance for today. You would think everyone knows thinner means higher performance in most situations. Yet instead of taking these awesome steels and optimizing performance, like we do with everything else, we decide they MUST be thicker and lower performing.

Exactly my thoughts and something I've been wondering about for years now. Most people know that a 1/4" thick piece of 1095 is plenty thick for any real use/abuse and yet when a stronger steel with as good or better edge holding is produced like 3V or even infi, the knives are STILL 1/4" thick. Not to mention edges that are twice as thick as they need to be as well. What point is a super wizbang steel if you don't get any better performance out of the knife as a whole?

 

[Kloepper Knife Works]

3v does in fact have hard carbides, just not as many of them. 3v has enough vanadium in it to create as many vanadium carbides as s30v, but with less than 1% carbon it won't (at the same Rc) because there isn't as much free carbon in the mix. The advantage I see is that you can push the hardness of 3V up in a thin knife and retain a lot of flexibility at a high Rc, and maintain very narrow angles without too much fear of edge damage.

 

[todapoint]

Great thread, a lot of valid points and good examples. Bark river makes some nice blades in 3v. I have my first custom on the way should be here by Monday! It's a Tom Krein tk-11 bird & trout 3v