Are plain edge knives better looking?

I was using serrated knives during many many years. One day, I was deciding to learn how to sharpen correctly a plain edge. Since I know how to obtain razor sharp plain edge I don't need serration. :p

In addition, the knife designs look more pure and sober with a plain edge... do you imagine a Nanbokucho period Samuraï katana with serrations ? :D
 
If you are just talking about looks I don´t think that one is prettier than the other, if you consider practical use I like a plain edge.

Serrations do some things better that a plain edge but I think in most (not all) of these cases saw teeth do even better, next time you want to cut thick rope or some hard fibrous material, try a fine toothed hacksaw and you might see what I mean.

I feel that the plain vs. serrated controversy will never end. Perhaps what we need is some serious testing, using smooth plain, coarse plain, small serrations, large serrations, including a couple of saws with small and large teeth and cutting a wide variety of materials, paper, bread, hair, rope, linoleum, bamboo, leather etc., and different kinds of cuts and tasks, push, slice, chop, whittle, etc.
 
it's very easy to say pe is better than ce, se etc etc
but if you're using it for your work and cutting diverse materials from drywall to vinyl tiling, you'll wish you had a combo edge
 
i have never liked the partial serrated knives, give me PE, or give me SE, but not both at the same time, imho the combo edges are not as usefull as either a PE or full SE.

i gen'ly like plain edges, but some knives imho (ie spyderco police/ayoob/civilian) look "right" with the serrations, while some (ie spyderco military) dont.

to each there own i guess........

greg
 
I'll admit it, when I first started collecting tacticals I went for the partial serrations on my Benchmade Emersons. Now I only have plain edge knives, except for a Spyderco Cricket.
If I think a PE will be damaged by cutting something (cable ties, wire, cable) I'll use the Cricket.
I think serrations and filework can be appealing, but I think most folders are too small to leave a good cutting edge when partially serrated.
 
Plain edged knives look like a knife shoud. There are some good looking serrated knives ----------- that could be made even better looking if improved to pe. I know of only one knife that would look worse as pe and that is Ryans Biohazard :eek: .
 
best case in point I can think of......look at an early gerber mark II, then look at the ones that were made later with serrations..........yuck!!!
 
Dialex, When I was sharpening knives door to door the Sharpmaker had not yet been invented. I had plenty of tools to use including some relatively equivalent in effect to the Sharpmaker. I had a triangular cross-section sharpening stone about the same grit as a Sharpmaker, I had a wedge-shaped India stone slip with two different cylindrical contours on the sides, I had cylindrical stones, I had metal rods of various diameters and Wet-or-Dry paper to fit over them, I had rat-tailed files, and I also had several cylindrical or conical abrassive burrs to chuck in my electric drill. In the door-to-door trade I would be faced with knives where the tips of the serrations were not only dull, they were rounded off. A little light work on a triangular rod would somewhat improve performance, but it would not satisfy the customers. They wanted the knives to look and work as good as new. This meant matching the contours of the serration scallops and removing enough metal to restore sharp points and sharp edges to every stinking serration. These were on 6 to 8-inch kitchen knives that typically had seen daily use for 5 or more years. The size and amount of usage seen on most pocket knives is trivial by comparison. I could reprofile an equivalent straight-edged kitchen knife in a little over 5 minutes. It was more like 20 minutes to rejuvenate a serrated blade. A Sharpmaker could never have done the job since it can only track the edge that you begin with. The points of the serrations and the smooth radius of the scallops degrade rather than improve as you hone them with a triangular hone.
 
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